The Game with Alex Hormozi
How to Survive Creator Burnout and Still Scale (Karat Reshare) | Ep 888
Mon, 19 May 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 | Acquisition
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Welcome back to the game. This is a guest spot on Eric Way's 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.
Foot up or shut up. When I met you three years ago, you had just started on your creator 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 creators in the space who've successfully executed on this, it's actually very minimal. I actually think creators are horrendously bad at picking products. Your constraint is not that you're a 97 out of 100 on content.
It's that you're a 0 out of 100 on monetization. That's a powerful concept right there. I think 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 have followers, but they don't have influence.
The point of short form is one thing, which is to drive them to long form. Would you invest in content creators? Alex Hormozy might be the first creator billionaire, and he's built his business really differently from other YouTubers who might follow like MrBeast.
Today, Alex shares why most creators aren't 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 Hormozy on how he did it. When I met you three years ago, you had just started on your creator journey.
Since then, millions of followers, over 250 million are writing for portfolio companies.
Is this where you wanted to be? I don't consider myself a traditional creator. I had businesses and had businesses outside of this that aren't my face in anything. But I saw just the monster amount of impressions that social media was getting and giving away for free. And I was like, this is the most insane thing I've ever seen.
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Chapter 2: How can creators build sustainable businesses?
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 of 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 you're paying 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 knows better than you do.
Right. You're the seller. So like in M&A terms, Uh, the seller of a business, the person who owns the business, you're 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 shit, um, and doesn't actually convert at all, then maybe you should just do the sponsorship.
It's the brand value.
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Chapter 3: What are the common mistakes creators make?
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 Barstool 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. 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 productions. So they're kind of becoming a media.
Zach Justice is trying to do this too, right? Yep. Yeah, I've talked 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. Let me sell your ad space.
And I think you could far more easily acquire a big network from that perspective, which is basically what Portnoy 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. That's a great example. Many, many have failed.
We're going to reinvent the game. It's like, well, you're just doing a newspaper state. I'll be on a new medium, the internet. There are some creators who have succeeded in building- Or tabloids. Yeah, exactly, tabloids, right? Yeah, 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 started 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 as primarily 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 I, you know, if I were MKBG, 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.
Also, can we hit on this real quick before we switch? So I want to say this mostly to the creators or people who have started from organic and like built an audience and whatnot. There are two types of angry. So 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.
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Chapter 4: How does monetization work for content creators?
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 in because they have the capital. Why not? To get more leverage on the ultimate dealer or joint venture. Was Logan going to learn the drink business and get brick and mortar distribution? Like maybe, but it's also the question is how much is your time worth? And I don't mean like
dollars per hour, anything like that, you absolutely can do it. And when I say time is like, how much is the next five years worth to you? 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 if you have an audience of their size, your constraint is going to be delivery. It's not distribution. Like,
yeah, it's not, it's not media distribution. It's going to be product distribution. Yeah. It's going to be product distribution. And so to, to build out the kind of infrastructure and knowledge base, uh, to satisfy the demand internationally, not just nationally, internet, cause they're in the UK too. Um, 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's building things truly from scratch.
Yeah, he's hired his own team and everything.
Yeah. And I don't know if you were to ask Jimmy again today if he could go back in time, if he would have.
Yeah.
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