The Game with Alex Hormozi
My Approach To Scalable Content - The Content Accordion | Ep 845
Mon, 03 Mar 2025
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 Mentioned in this episode:Get access to the free $100M Scaling Roadmap at www.acquisition.com/roadmap
Chapter 1: What is the accordion of content?
So I'm going to call this the accordion of content, all right? And so I get, I'd say, one of the most frequently asked questions I get, and I would say about a third of the people who listen to this podcast, this is me estimating, but about a third of the people who listen to this podcast generate their leads from inbound content.
So they're either doing SEO, they're making content on social media, they're making YouTube videos, they're making shorts. Basically, they use organic stuff to attract customers, right? And one of the most common questions that I get about that is quantity versus quality and narrow versus broad.
And I do think that I have some pretty developed thoughts on this as I've gone through a lot of iterations for how we create content. And this is especially, I don't know, I feel like I have a lot of context on this because I come as somebody who didn't This isn't the only way that I get customers.
And my experience before acquisition.com and starting the YouTube worlds that I did was not this at all. It was almost the majority direct response, just kind of like paid ads. And so adding in content and kind of branding has been something that I've had to take very like scientifically. And what I mean by that is like it didn't come natural to me. I wasn't like, oh, I just want to make content.
Like, first off, I'm not somebody who I don't wake up every day thinking like, man, I want to make content. That's not that's not me. Some people are like that. I'm also not somebody who's like, man, I love attention. I would say that once a month, I'm like, I don't even know if I want to keep doing this. And so, but the many notes that I get from you guys honestly do keep me going.
You know, it's funny because like, I get so much, I get so much, pushback and sometimes hate publicly for like sharing the stuff that I do. And people were like, you're faking your numbers or like this guy's, you know, some guru. And I'm like, I just, I, I just share the stuff because this is what helped me out. And if it doesn't help you, then don't use it. You know?
And so I'm definitely not somebody who enjoys the spotlight. And for the vast majority of my career, notwithstanding the last five years, my entire attention was to be rich and unknown. And so it's only in the last five years that that has changed anyways.
the accordion of content so i think what might be helpful is kind of walk you through the different seasons of content creation that i've gone through and then kind of explain kind of the concept of the accordion of content so uh in the very beginning i started making content by making facebook lives when those were like a thing um into a group that was for gym owners that was basically the first thing that i did and that was what started the gym secrets podcast
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Chapter 2: How did Alex Hormozi start his content creation journey?
I would do these lives and then we'd rip off the audio and then put them on this podcast. Right. And that was July of 17. So kind of cool because that was 90 days after I lost everything, which still to this day, I think is like the coolest thing is that like basically from zero all the way to here is documented. Not not always, you know, the prettiest documentation, but it's it's out there.
So that was kind of that was honestly, I did that for like, two and a half, three years before I did anything else. Then I want to say in 2020, 20 is either very late 2019 or 2020. Nope, it's 2020. It's 2020. I'm almost positive 2020. I decided that I thought YouTube was a good idea. And so I went to a vendor and he said, just do your normal podcasts, but I'll just post them on YouTube.
And so he would just trim them, which I found out what the difference between trimming and editing was much later. But I thought he was editing. He was actually just trimming them, which just means taking out the oohs and aahs and whatever craziness that I say.
Um, and so the reason that the first videos are like me in my closet or whatever is because I was doing, you know, like the aesthetics didn't really matter for a podcast or, you know, Facebook lives. They didn't, it didn't really matter. So I would just talk to my webcam and just record probably pretty terrible quality audio, but that's what I did.
And so I committed to three times a week and that's, and it worked. And I think I went from zero to like 400,000 subscribers, I think in that period of time, just trimming and posting. Um, So then after that, and so at this point, just to give you like a recap here, I was just doing... Basically only long forms. I was just doing YouTubes and podcasts, and that was basically it.
So then I had a guy who reached out to me and said, hey, I can do these new things called Reels for you. And it was right as Reels and TikTok and stuff was coming out. And I really didn't want to get into that. I was like, you can't say anything in 60 seconds. All these kids with their short time attention spans, whatever. But he said he would do it for no extra work for me.
He said, you already have enough stuff out there. I'll just clip stuff that already exists. And I was like, all right, that's pretty compelling. I don't have to do anything. You can just like basically advertise me for free. And he said, I'll even post it. And I was like, great. And so he just started doing that and they started really doing well. And I was like, wow, that's pretty cool.
After a quarter or two, he said, you know what would work even better is if we just like flew out and just did like one dedicated day. to get clips. And so that was kind of the next iteration is we would do 100 clips in one day, every 90 days. So that's what I would do. I'd sit down, I'd do 100 shorts in one sitting once every quarter.
And then that basically created my clips for the whole time period. So I'd have one new one and then one repurpose. I'd have like two a day. So we did that for a while. Then I had a really good editor reach out and say, hey, you know, you don't edit your videos. Like if you edited them, they do better than if you just trim out the oohs and ahhs.
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Chapter 3: What role does quantity versus quality play in content creation?
It's like, but you're getting views to your page, so put more stuff out. To give you an example on this, I think one of the top Instagram pages posts 100 times a day. It's an Indian account in Bollywood. 100 posts a day, they get 9 billion views a month. Billion with a B. It's like one for every person on earth. That's right. That's math.
Anyways, the answer to how much content you should make is as much amazing stuff as possible. But here's the kicker. Everyone has limited resources. You have limited time. You have limited bandwidth. You have limited money for both recording, editing, and manpower, etc. So... What do you do? I think you basically think about this as the two factors.
You've got, call it Q1 is quantity and Q2 is quality, is if you want Q1 times Q2 to be the highest absolute number. That's it. And so if you think that you can dramatically ramp up quality if you cut quantity in half, so basically if you can more than double quality by cutting volume in half, then you should do it. If you can keep quality more or less the same and double quantity,
You should do it. Now, I will say this on a personal note is that, in general, when you increase quantity, you almost always grow. And that's usually because when you know how to do something at a certain level, just doing it more is typically easier than doing it better. Because usually, like, I don't know, but I'll just do more now.
Chapter 4: How to optimize the amount of content you should create?
But here's the crazy part is that the more you do it, the better you get at it. And so it is a virtuous cycle between more and better. And so there is no answer. It is, it is not a problem to be solved is a dichotomy to be managed. So that's the accordion on quality and quantity. Now the next one that I get really a lot of questions about is the topics themselves. What do I talk about?
What blog posts do I make? What emails do I send? What shorts do I make? What longs do I make? And as someone who's experimented with this a lot, I feel like I have a decent amount to say on the subject. So obviously, I am first and foremost for business owners, right? That's that you guys are my people. That's why I do this from a financial perspective.
But I am not immune to the fact that if I make a meals video, or if I make just kind of a generic life advice video, it will almost always do significantly better asterisk, if we measure it by views. Now, does that necessarily translate to more sales? In the data that I've collected, the answer is no. Asterix again, but there is some nuance, which I want to explain.
And so I said, this is the accordion of content, but the second accordion is the narrow versus broad, which is. I have gone super broad for periods of time being like, okay, I want to get as basically the theory is if I just talk about everything, that's really big and affects everyone. If I talk about health, I talk about relationships. Maybe I talk about just personal finance.
Those are very broad topics. I talk about careers, jobs, things like that. Those are broad topics that affect almost everybody. And so when I do that, the theory would state that if I got the whole world in my audience using that stuff, then I'll have a smaller percentage of people as a relative percentage of my audience that are business owners, but I will have a higher absolute amount.
Now, when we did this in practice, it didn't actually work out that way. And that's because branding doesn't work that way. And I'll give you a simple example on this. So I don't know if you know, Kim Kardashian started a fund for private equity. And she recently had to close down the fund. And I actually don't think it got a lot of press. I don't know why. Maybe it didn't.
Maybe it had a five-day news cycle. Anyways, I noticed that they had to shut it down or it wasn't performing the way they had expected. And so you'd think, well, wait, everybody knows who Kim Kardashian is. And so she should be able to raise, one, monster money, and two, be able to crush things. But the thing is, is that her influence... is not of a business person. Think about that for a second.
Do you trust Kim for beauty? Sure. Do you trust her for fashion? Sure. Why? Because she's demonstrated that. She's got, you know, 20 plus years or 30 plus years. Man, it's been a while. Anyways, a while that she's been kind of like a fashion icon. I think she's wanted that. Now, I think she's tried to shift towards business tycoon or businesswoman, but it takes a long time to, quote, undo that.
you know, 20, 30 years of branding, right? And so she doesn't have the same influence in business as, say, somebody who's maybe a much smaller creator, but has provided significant value. So I want to explain the difference here, all right? There are elements of persuasion. One of them is power. So I'm going to explain what that is. So power in different contexts could mean different things.
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Chapter 5: How does topic choice affect content reach and sales?
People don't need to follow all of your instructions for them to have the positive liking towards you. And so if you're worried about like one, repeating content or two, well, what if people don't follow most of my stuff? That's one, normal, two, fine. Because it only takes one good experience for someone to have positive affinity towards you and your brand.
And so you might be like, wait a second, how's this relating back to the, you know, the accordion content thing? All right, so let me bring it back in. When I was making all the broad stuff, what I found was my book sales actually went down. The number of companies that were planning to become portfolio companies went down.
All my views metrics went up, but all the metrics that mattered to me actually went down. And so then I was like, oh gosh, complete pivot. And so I went from super, super broad to back to business. And so I've actually been in the back to business kind of vein, I would say for a while now. It's probably been at least nine months at this point, maybe longer. No, I think about nine months.
In this time period, all of the metrics that matter to me have gone back up, which I care a lot about. Now, within the context of business, the objective is still to be, or within the context of whatever your narrow thing is, the objective is still to be get as many views as you can within that pond, right?
And so if I can make business content accessible to more people so that it's both narrow and wide, so let me explain what I mean by that before you freak out. Hold on. So I would define wide content as content that is only valuable to a beginner. I define narrow content as content that is only valuable to someone who's advanced.
So for example, if I said how to get your first five customers, that will be only valuable to someone who's a beginner. Somebody who's advanced already knows how to get their first five customers. They're not that interested in that. On the flip side, if I say how to sell a company, that is not going to be valuable to a beginner and will only be valuable to somebody who's advanced.
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Chapter 6: Why does broad versus narrow content matter?
Now, here's the cross section. If I talk about strategy, or I talk about leverage, or I talk about pricing, these are things that are valuable for both beginners and advanced people. And so that's to me, as I think, as I've kind of evolved in my content, it's like, how do I make stuff that's valuable for everyone, but still gets me the people that I want, which is business owners, right?
You're like, again, how does this go to the accordion? I'm going to get there. As my content has gone from, you know, super niche to what I want to talk about, to super broad, to now what I try to aspire to do is both narrow and broad. wide together content within a business theme.
I, over this last nine months, have had people who I really like a lot who are in my life who said, you know what's interesting? I actually came to your stuff because I saw some short of you wearing a chef hat and making some meal, right? And I got that from both YouTube and on Shorts. And I thought that was so interesting.
And other people were saying, hey, you know, I actually found you from this really broad podcast that you did with Lewis Howes or with Ed Milet. And, you know, I talk about business, but I talk about a lot of philosophical stuff because that's something that I'm interested in. And so people are like, you know, it actually really resonated with me.
But they're business owners, but they're like your philosophy is what rang true to me. Like it wasn't sugarcoated. It wasn't fluffy. And, you know, you didn't seem like a complete asshole. Notice I didn't say, you know, nice guy. I said complete, not 100%, right? Or at least I try not to be. Anyways, point is, by me hearing this though, it has shifted my perspective yet again.
I'm going to explain my current thesis for the quote, perfect thing to be managed. So I already give you the perfect algorithm for quantity and quality, which is maximum quantity, maximum quality is the goal, right? Now, what is the goal with content for topics? You want max wide and max narrow, so that's the obvious one.
But here's the little special ticker, here's the special, the sauce, the flakes that we sprinkle on top, is that I believe that the content should reflect who you are. Hold on. It should reflect your thumbprint. Basically, it should be an accurate representation of the proportionality of your time or interests. And so for me, business is the vast majority of my life.
Philosophy is a portion of my life. Fitness is a portion of my life. My relationship with my wife and partner, business partner from that perspective, wife otherwise, is a portion of my life. Now, if you don't want to be public about something, that's different.
But if you want to be public and you want the perception to match reality, then you'd want those proportions to be as close as possible to one another. And so I think that if you just go narrow and wide on your topic, I think you'll build a super, super, super loyal following from that thing.
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