This episode unpacks Hormozi’s critical warning from the affiliate event: AI businesses without proprietary data will be destroyed by larger LLM providers. Acquisition.com’s ACQ AI succeeds because it’s built on two years of internal consulting data unavailable publicly—without unique data moats, you’re building an easily commoditized overlay that OpenAI or Anthropic will replicate.
Key Takeaways:
- Proprietary Data Is the Only AI Moat Hormozi confirms AI businesses are primarily data problems—without exclusive datasets large LLMs don’t have, your product is defenseless when giants enter your niche with superior UX.
- Marketers Build Bad Products Software requires delivery excellence over conversion optimization—marketers default to sales-first thinking and neglect the product quality and stickiness that actually creates valuation (high margins, low churn, viral growth).
- Five Years to Understand an Industry Jumping into software or new industries restarts the five-year learning curve required to see all moving parts—most entrepreneurs aren’t willing to sacrifice existing lifestyle and expertise to go back to zero.
Hear the full episode for why Hormozi pushes back on entrepreneurs layering AI products onto existing businesses and the rare exceptions who succeeded by going into a cave for four years.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious, a lot of interesting deal activity for the past couple days. I’ll touch on that stuff soon. Very interesting subdivide opportunities and just feeling super in the groove when it comes to underwriting deals like that. I anticipate doing a lot more of those over the coming months and years here.
But in the meantime, I want to jump into more of the Hormozi live event notes from the affiliate event in the acquisition.com headquarters. A number of these podcasts here, and I think the content is just exceptional from the learnings that I got spending 11 straight hours with Alex Hormozi alongside 99 other qualified entrepreneurs.
I’m super lucky to be there and just want to pass those lessons along to you. Remember this was structured through mainly fireside chats and then open mic with the audience. And so where we left off, you know, jumping into this other fireside chat. So, you know, one of these entrepreneurs was just, you know, like we talked about one of these previous podcasts, like focus too much on the external.
results like, you know, just trying to build a $2 million business, $5 million, $10 million, or what have you. Like there’s just like this number, you know, round number that we just get attached to and feel like we need to get there one way or another. But, in reality, it’s the inputs that, that get us there. So if we focus on nailing and executing on those, inputs reliably and consistently,
that’s gonna take care of those external metrics by themselves. It’s just really hard to focus on that given it’s just more boring, right? Compared to thinking of the shining number on the other side. And so somebody was asking more about how future oriented are you, Alex, and so forth. And know Hormozi himself like…
point out, yeah, he’s very future oriented. That’s why like Layla and Charon will run more of the day to day at acquisition because of how much, you know, kind of all over the place Alex is and how much he lives in the future. And I can certainly relate, you know, if you’ve done the five strengths, the Gallup pole strength finders, I think that’s one of the best personality tests that
I’ve done, we do that internally as a team here. And out of all of those, I think there’s almost like 40 different strengths. But like my number one was just future, thinker. Like you can just totally relate, just always, you know, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs probably have a touch of that. like constantly living in the future, but you have to be, and this is something where Mozi pointed out, is like you have to be careful about living like too much in the future or you just lose sight of.
those internal execution tactics that you just need to take care of. And he’s like, as a caveat, yes, the person with the longest time horizon usually wins. It’s like, that’s what we try to keep in mind too. I’ve, like a 50 year plan for what we want to do with Sirius Land Capital. Again, I feel like we’re just getting started.
in a lot of ways, regardless of amount of success that we’ve, or lack thereof that we’ve had so far. And he referenced Elon of, again, some of the electric cars or spaceships and so forth. Even in Elon’s first company, in his early 20s, he was already talking about that and trying to structure a multi-decade path forward.
He’s like, yeah, there’s a lot of people don’t have that type of foresight to stick with it. And even Hormozi, so he’s like, yeah, he has like kind of a two to three year timeline for what can be accomplished. But beyond that, like it just starts to get fuzzy because your circumstances change both internally and externally. And it’s just, you know, he’s found it personally just harder to assess beyond that. But he’s like, you know, regardless of any of that, like.
generally his recommendation for any type of entrepreneur, current small business owners, just focus on building a big company because that will just allow you to craft as many possible vectors and directions that your eventual future can go into. So you have to build that engine to…
to get to where you want to go, even if that changes in the future. it’s like, yeah, just refocus back on those internal metrics for what you need to do to execute on in order to get to where you want to go. And kind of related to this,
you know, another fireside chat diving into here is just, yeah, again, there was a lot of marketers there and like, all get, we all get so hungry. Again, I think a lot of times entrepreneurs like, how do we, you know, get as much money quickly, right? You you got to deliver value to the marketplace. Like everybody understands that, but how, like why aren’t these results coming faster than, or they never kind of come as fast as we would like. And so,
know, Hormozi was really pointing out, was like just far too many business owners. They just rushed to try to bring in money from customers too quickly and focus, you know, too little on nurturing. And, you know, he took a poll of us in the audience. Again, like pretty much everybody, know, a hundred people who clearly did the affiliate program for Hormozi’s launch, like clearly, you know, we’re in his audience, like we’re fans of.
of what he’s built and the products he’s built. he started pulling like how many people first heard of me? don’t know, like within the last six months. There was like a handful of, or even within a few months, like a handful of hands there. Then within the 12 months, I think I raised my hand for that. I might’ve heard of Hormozi like a little over 12 months, maybe mid 2024, but I don’t think I really started consuming and educating myself from his content until…
around Q4 of 2024. So it was like right around that year mark, roughly. But I think I’d heard people like mention his name and stuff before a few times. So like, I try to go from when I started like really looking into it. And like, even then, like within the last year, it was like a me and a few other hands that were raised. And then it was into within like the last two years, then it was like a significantly larger chunk.
of people and then like beyond two years and like a good amount there. So, you know, the lesson there was, you know, the vast majority of folks who have been in Hormozi’s orbit, like they’ve kind of been nurtured into his audience for quite a while, two plus years of kind of consuming or educating themselves from the content and now like, you know, actually showing up into a live event there.
And some of these folks had gone to the other paid live events and so forth. So some of them are kind of repeat from that perspective. that was kind of Hormozi’s point of like, know, it’s not like everybody just raised their hand within the last three months of hearing about Hormozi and then just trying to affiliate out for him. He built up a lot of trust over a period of time. so, you know, especially those of us who like market and, you
We might do launch events and so forth. Like, yeah, not everybody’s going to convert and the timing might not be inappropriate and so forth. But we can’t really hold that against our customers. First off, we have to make sure our product and service are just exceptional quality that somebody wants to buy. That’s ground zero. But assuming that is the case, like you just have to understand that like some people are just going to take a lot longer to come to a purchase decision. And so you just continue to nurture and provide more value, like value, value, value, like give, give, give, give, give, ask.
give, give, give,
they wanted to share in the vision, like this last launch, you know, they bought through my link here. And like a number of folks like, yeah, this timing, I just don’t have the time here, but I really liked the content. And so, you know, there’s two launch events or like A2A signups per year. And so it’s like, okay, we continue to nurture. Like you start to see more of the value. It might take a year longer than that to eventually pull the trigger, but you you have to be patient alongside your audience and again, continue to provide value. Can’t just like rush the…
the cash grab, so to speak. So I think that’s something else in mind that we can do a lot better with. Then there was another piece here. So within my notes, this fireside chat was, I think it was one of his biggest, I think he was like the second highest affiliate, but like the one who brought the most money in. And like a lot of these affiliates did great. they, if you saw Hormozis follow on like,
launch debrief he recorded a couple weeks ago. By 20 % of all the sales out of his, so it’s like $20 million roughly came from affiliate marketing, like a huge chunk came from affiliates here. So like some of these guys did a talk, I did the bare minimum. Again, I was very lucky to be there, but some of these guys were doing thousands and thousands of leads.
and did like a lot of outbound channels. Alex was kind of drafting, you know, kind of a graph here of how, you know, you need to kind of push people along this, know, in order to push them over the edge to, you know, effectively invest in your product or service, there’s going to be a much smaller part of the funnel that’s like much closer to the money. Like they just need a little nudge in order to, you know,
get over the ledge to paying for your product or service. And they need very little information. They might need a couple, maybe one or two questions answered, but they’re already well-nurtured. And so you just need to of nudge those folks. But the further you go out, there’s just not going to be that many people who are very low-information, low-hanging fruit. Otherwise, business would be super easy, right? You just have to nudge folks to give you money.
vast majority of folks that are going to be in your colder audiences, like they’re going to need a lot more info. So it becomes high info on the colder your audience is to low info in regard to folks who are like closer to the edge of giving money. So you said, know, to kind of solve those high info requirements of that type of audience, especially for
outbound marketing is that ads and brand solve for that. You both of those together, like, yeah, you build more brand awareness and like, again, that kind of nurtures people in and of themselves, like, you know, that you’re a trustworthy individual or company to actually deliver results. And then again, advertising, like that’s going to be targeting other folks to bring them into your sphere. I’d probably like…
I think he was relating brand into organic content that’s out there, kind of goes hand in hand towards building brands. So it’s just, again, you’re going to need to feed a lot, a lot more information in order to push people further along that continuum to eventually decide to invest into you. So that was just, I thought, another helpful visual reminder for…
what to kind of think of when it comes to marketing channels and in particular outbound. And Alex was mentioning this as well too, where, I think I remarked in the previous podcast, like how many other entrepreneurs they were just trying to do AI type startups and on top of their core product or service.
I think, I can’t remember if I remarked on this, but either way, it bears reiterating because it’s like just such a critical takeaway. just, know, Hormozi was just saying, you know, that AI, you know, will put, or like the bigger AI companies will put more AI businesses out of business compared to non-AI businesses. Meaning, you know, and this is like mainly related to proprietary data.
Like all AI, and I’ve come to this bigger realization as well too, as we’ve had our team focus more on what’s necessary to build land price or out to the next level. It’s just we need to realize we needed way more data to just be more accurate. It’s AI businesses, it’s primarily a data problem. And if you don’t have that, you don’t really have anything. And you can be more readily out-competed because open AI.
Anthropic or Google what have you like all of a sudden you just become like an overlay for one of those larger LLM models that Do have a tremendous amount of data and are gonna have like better front end and UX and so forth, too So if you don’t have something unique from a data perspective that those large companies don’t have like your your moat is Effectively non-existent like it might exist now in terms of like they’re not
like specifically targeting your niche, niche, but the chances of you defending yourself longer term as those models and capabilities continue to get better, you’re just kind of playing a fool’s game there. So, know, Hormozi was really pointing that out. And plus like, you know, he’s obviously biased to say that too, because like his acquisition, ACQ AI, which they’ve like, you know, put a huge amount of resources behind.
I’ve used it more consistently as well too. I think it’s super, super solid, but it’s built on proprietary data that they’ve built over both currently as well as the past two years of just feeding it everything they’ve been doing internally at acquisition.com and all the consulting they’ve done. none of that is publicly available. And I’ve seen other people try to do Hormozi, GPTs and so forth, and they’re just not nearly as good even when they’re trying to use the publicly available info and so forth.
I thought that was a really salient point, to, to keep in mind here, just like given how many people, like everybody kind of thinks they are, they want to be an AI first business and so forth. but you know, some of those like non AI businesses, like, you know, some certain home services and, and so forth, like, they’re just not going to be, as reliant or susceptible to kind of AI.
service delivery for, you know, taking care of that customer base. you know, like the more analog your business is, you’re probably safer from an AI perspective. And I’ve also seen Harmozzi talk about this too. like, yeah, the internet’s been around for 30 years at like a wider scale. And there’s like still so many businesses that like barely have an internet presence and they’re still like plenty successful. you know,
Even though AI is top of mind for everybody, there’s still going to be routes to succeed just based on the natural adoption curve of the worldwide population. So that’s just something to keep in mind as well. And definitely was one of the most critical insights that I got. was perfect timing for me as we were orienting around land pricing and so forth.
Other insights and conclusions we were coming to internally here. So like it’s good to hear, know, Hormozi’s perspective is also like making a huge multi-million dollar bet within the AI space on like what it takes to succeed there. So we’ll go ahead and pause on that one. Definitely on the back half here. We’re getting closer to the end of these notes here. So again, I really hope that this is coming across as
you know, just really valuable and strong content for your own business. Again, me talking through this is like, yeah, just helping put the pieces in place even more as well too. So I’m excited to continue alongside the journey going through this as well too. Definitely a handful more of pods. Looking forward to next time, some other deal related updates. Remember, SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding needs.
Land Daily Diligence Facebook group. Subscribe and share everybody. Looking forward to next time. Take care now. Bye.
