This episode unpacks critical frameworks from Hormozi’s affiliate event, focusing on decision-making under uncertainty and the fundamental assumptions driving business success. Hormozi shares tactical insights on quiz funnels (first three questions determine completion), the limitations of e-commerce exit value (brands rarely sell without strong customer loyalty), and the 30% conversion rate on compelling upsells.
Key Takeaways:
- The Three-Question Rule for Engagement Once someone answers your first three questions (in surveys, sales calls, or onboarding), they’ll finish—make those questions count by focusing on the most valuable information for both parties.
- E-commerce Businesses Are Nearly Unsellable Without Brand Equity Most e-commerce operations have minimal exit value unless you’ve built genuine customer goodwill; the underlying assets and infrastructure are easily replicated or replaced.
- Your Base Assumption Determines Everything Else Serious Land Capital’s entire business rests on one assumption: US land will remain valuable—everything else is execution, and you only pivot when that core assumption is proven wrong, not when obstacles appear.
- The Ignorance Tax Is Just Cost of Business Pushing hard in your chosen direction until an underlying assumption proves false is the price of learning—most people quit before discovering whether they were actually wrong or just hadn’t pushed long enough.
This episode crystallizes the difference between strategic pivots (when core assumptions fail) and premature abandonment (when execution gets hard).
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious time for some more takeaways from that, Hormozi live event. I went to earlier this year. again, more notes than I’ve ever taken at another live event. this was for his, a hundred affiliates. a number of them were, the top sellers are the top 50, affiliates for his, latest book launch. then 50 of us got lucky, if we hit a certain threshold.
of affiliate signups to be able to go out there for a day and spend 13 hours straight without sormozy structured in a fireside chat and audience Q and a type setup. So we are deep in the audience Q and a portion here. It’s a whole bunch of different types of businesses, a lot centered around, you know, internet marketing of various kinds. No surprise given this was an event set up for, for affiliates for the book launch.
So, you know, somebody was asking about quiz funnels and I mean, those, one of my initial business mentors who I mentioned in my latest newsletter, Ryan Lovak, he, you know, really made a name for himself based on the ask method, which was all about setting up quiz funnels very strategically to, you know,
both service lead generation as well as convert more customers because you could use a kind of sticky quiz funnel to then build out copy and routes to, you know, sell your customers, you know, based on the type of responses that they were giving. Yeah, that’s it in a nutshell and it works and still works very, very well.
playing into the curiosity factor and speaking individually to different customers here. And I’m sure AI is only going to help more setting things up like that. So, you know, a number of businesses, you can use quiz funnels in virtually anything. And what Hormozi was noting is that within the marketing space, really after three questions, like, you know,
You can note for yourself, sometimes you get various surveys from different companies. If you get somebody to stick past three, the first three questions, then you can make the survey really as long as you want because the person is already committed to finishing that quiz and you won’t see a noticeable drop off in results there. So.
You know, that’s just a tactic to keep in mind that if you are designing a quiz, like make those first three questions really, you know, number one, well, mean, it’s different structures. I mean, you can make kind of a softball question easy, like get the, get the, ball moving, for, for the possible lead there. So, you you’re not asking something more difficult, but really you should be focusing on, the three.
most helpful questions for your business and hopefully for your customer within those first few questions you ask somebody. And then after that can be, you know, whatever else you might want to ask. So even if you’re not doing like an online quiz funnel, I mean, just keep in mind for, again, really any type of business, you know, even in the land business, I mean, you’re asking sellers, sometimes buyers, various questions.
you know, over the phone or text or what have you. So yeah, try to really make your questions count, especially off the bat before they might just get, you know, sick of answering you or, you know, bored or whatever, something else comes up and see if you can actually keep them focused. And, you know, even if they might drop off that first time, you might get some valuable info from those initial questions to potentially follow up later and.
convert down the line. So word to the wise to keep in mind there. And somebody was asking about an e-commerce business and they wanted to sell it, I think in favor of just coaching around in like they prefer doing a coaching model of building e-commerce businesses rather than running an e-commerce business itself. And Hermosa was like,
virtually there’s gonna be no buyers for that. Like the chances of selling an e-commerce business, like it’s pretty much only sellable as a brand, but for underlying assets, like there’s just not, there’s not really any value attributed to businesses like that.
So you really have to just bank on, you have excellent goodwill with a certain customer segment that you’ve been going after where your brand is actually worth anything. But again, you can kind of break this down from first principles. Other than that, what are you really buying into? And honestly, you can relate land businesses
to serving as e-commerce in a lot of ways here where, yeah, the underlying assets can have some level of value. More often than not, if somebody was trying to sell their land business and they haven’t necessarily moved assets, I would probably throw a massive discount on those. Given that, depending on how long they’ve been in the portfolio, there’s a decent amount of.
a decent chance that the assets are not worth as much as, you know, the owner of the company might be attributing to them, especially if they’re looking to exit the business. they’re probably going to be a bit more distressed assets. and then beyond that, it’s like, okay, how much is that brand really worth in the land space? mean, some folks have built up, you know, qualified, and trustworthy brands in
especially in particular geographies where they might’ve established a footprint or they have a local presence and so forth. But other than that, it’s real, how much are you really standing out from other land businesses who are largely doing the same thing? They might be offering on slightly different pieces of land or different numbers behind it. But again, how much differentiation is there really?
from that perspective. And so then you get a sense of, yeah, what is the underlying value of some of these e-commerce businesses and, you know, the infrastructure built within usually that can be replaced or another company is going to buy it up. they already have their own infrastructure, their own teams. So again, you break it down and from like an e-commerce side, you know, you might be able to tribute some.
value on some underlying assets. Again, like think about if somebody was trying to sell, don’t know, like custom paint brushes or something like that, just throwing it out there. Really niche product. How much inventory are they really going to have anyway? And how much can you attribute to that? How much of a multiple can you, can you put on those, especially if like the main person building those products is like no longer going to be involved. so you might still have the brand, but that that’s really it. So that was kind of Hormozi. He’s point to, to really keep in mind here is just.
Again, the type of business you’re in can really affect the exit potential or even the multiple that you might be able to get. So something to keep in mind. And when it came to upsells, there’s like infinite amount of upsell opportunities. it’s just like, yeah, whenever you can make them, just try because on average,
upsells will work about 30 % of the time. That is of course, assuming you have a compelling offer. That’s probably where most people screw up. is there, is there offer? Well, the core offer probably is not very good. And then the upsell offers probably, you know, not very good or even worse potentially. So, or they hadn’t put enough thought into it. And so then, yeah, you’re not going to see those numbers there, but let’s just take the base stakes. Like you’re actually doing your job properly. You have a compelling core offer. You have a compelling upsell offer.
Then if you make those offers, yeah, about one in three people will take that upsell. And I think generally you want to price upsells like, I forget what his general ruling is. it’s, know, even if you make it like 10 X what that core offer costs, like you’re still going to get that potential 30 % number. Obviously if it’s like two grade juice of a difference, that number is going to shift, but you know, that’s kind of a general rule and thumb.
rule of thumb that you can keep in mind. And, you know, what upsells can you use? You know, like more of the same. If somebody order, you know, buy one, get one free thing. Well, no, that’s not really. That’s not necessarily an upsell, but you could do like a buy to get get get one free instead. So if somebody was only coming in to get one, they could buy two.
And they still get that bonus item. And so that’s just an example of more of the same that you’re offering as far as an upsell or especially for tools, various, potentially even info products or softwares, like you can just sell more help. So a lot of folks, we even seen that in the land space too, of like, hey, they might give the underlying product.
for free or for much lower cost. But if you want to, you know, work with the team that built that product and have it implemented, it’s like, yeah, that’s kind of the pathway of, free data, free information, but, the, implementation costs, something so that that’s a really good route to do upsells with is when, especially if
customers can cut down on the amount of time for them to get the outcome that they’re looking for, or even just to spend on the underlying product, because who really wants to introduce more complexity into their day-to-day? Then you can just offer an upsell of, hey, I can take care of this for you. So that’s something else to keep in mind. mean, again, think within the land space how many little upsells there are for that. If you survey,
company, they’ll be out doing the survey and you can either have it delivered to you and then you have to send it over to the county to get it recorded in some jurisdictions or it’s like, Hey, we’ll walk it over. We’ll send it over to the county. Here’s our fee for getting it recorded for you. It’s a basic upsell like that. It’s like, yeah, it’s just more help with the service that you were already getting. makes it super easy to, convey over to a customer. and we’ve gladly paid for that before and probably will again.
So another item related to vision is just, and I think I’ve remarked on this before in something I think about constantly as well, like we try to have a 50 plus year vision for serious land capital. And Hermosius is like, you know, the person with the longest time horizon tends to win, you know, so long as they’re taking continuous execution on the necessary actions.
Um, to achieve that vision, but you know, the person who can just, you know, be able to stay in the game and understand that they are moving toward that longer-term vision day after day after day will have the resilience, um, to get through, you know, all the nonsense, uh, every, all the difficult times, um, because they have their eyes on the prize for what they’re really working for. And the longer you tend to stay in something and continue to get better and execute at it, you know,
the higher your rewards tend to come and the better you tend to get at your underlying skill or product that you’re trying to build, business you’re trying to build when most people are just gonna quit right at step one or step 1.5. So worth keeping in mind. know, Hormozi was also like, and this is true for most entrepreneurs, because again, most business owners lose money or break even. Like that’s just the reality.
You know, when you have bills to pay and it’s like, you you can’t even get your head above water to even understand what your vision is. Yeah. Figure out how to get your bills paid first. Again, this is probably just going to be the majority of folks from Hormozi’s like, yeah, you got to take care of that. You know, put your mask on first before you can think about, you know, larger vision here. But as soon as you can, you know, pay your bills and, you know, not feel like you’re drowning all the time.
then it’s like, okay, what is your vision going to be? You know, start out with a smaller one here. You know, Hormozi was even like, you know, even somebody who has never has to work again, anything like that. He’s like anything beyond a three to five year vision is hard for him to perceive. is, there’s so many variables out there. I think, you know, a lot of folks are going to struggle with that too, outside of handful of exceptions, even us having like a 50 year vision. I have an idea of where,
you know, we want to take this business over time and what type of assets we’re going to continue to push into. But, you know, can I say whether we’ll be on X asset in six months or 18 months or potentially even 36 months? It can be hard to say just because there’s so many variables that can come into place and how certain deals are performing or life events, what have you.
that you still have to be on your toes and willing to adjust, but you still have kind of that North Star vision of where you’re trending to, even if the exact hurdles that you have to overcome might come up at different points in time here. So something to keep in mind as well there when it comes to your potential vision.
And probably similar to that too is just, you know, that,
You know, so many folks will just, you know, doubt what, you know, once they have a certain motivation or even they start trending in a certain direction, like inevitably you’re going to, you’re going to run into hardship. so, you know, most folks like, yeah, instinctually they’ll just want to quit or just pivot in another direction. but her Moses key thing that he, you know, he says again and again and again, and what has led him to this level of success is just, you know, he keeps, keeps pushing in a certain direction until.
an underlying assumption is proven wrong. And if he’s proven wrong or his team has proven wrong, like that’s just the cost of having to figure it out.
or
You know, even, um, or I said that wrong too. So I was looking at my notes. So if, um, he’s not proven wrong with a certain assumption, like all the work of, you know, having to push through, you know, all the uncertainty, um, like that, that that’s just the, the ignorance tax. Uh, like I talk about that a number of times. I mean, I can’t tell you how many.
Ignorance taxes we paid over this past year, past five years of running this business where it’s just like, yeah, I know so much more in retrospect, but like just at that time we, we were pushing in a certain direction. We were utilizing the data in front of us. Yeah. We obviously again, 2020 hindsight could have been doing better in certain areas. Um, and I’ve mentioned effectively all of those across, this podcast here, um, or on, on the newsletter.
And so you just have to take that as a cost of doing business, a cost of living your life. but the important thing is, is that you push in that direction that you anticipate being right. again, until that underlying assumption that you have is proven wrong, but oftentimes it won’t be, if it, like most folks won’t push hard enough and long enough to figure out,
that their underlying assumption is truly wrong there because most of the time, there’s other folks in the world that have already solved this problem or further ahead of you or just took a slightly different approach or just pushed longer and they still figured it out. I mean, how many folks, even just looking at the land business, like tons of folks have exited the industry, wholesalers within the home…
side of real estate brokers exit the industry, but it’s not like everybody is out, right? So there’s definitely still folks succeeding. We’re succeeding. You know, a lot of bumps and bruises along the way. Some punches in the face, punches in the gut. But, know, it’s still feasible because we continue pushing hard. again, our underlying assumption is that vacant land or
land within the US writ large is still going to continue to be a valuable asset. that’s how baseline my assumption is. Like that’s the underlying assumption of our entire business. So like you gotta be able to boil it down to like, okay, what is your base assumption that you’re making? And if that’s the only assumption that we have to prove, then the rest is just that execution, right?
Uh, and it would be foolhardy to, um, you know, have that or assume that assumption was not true because it’s obviously not right. Unless we were like the only, the only possible way that, um, assumption could be false is, uh, you know, if there was just, um, complete environmental catastrophe that like, you know, it’s going to destroy the entire.
continent or nuclear wasteland or we just found like a better way to live as a species within some like virtual reality a metaverse Allah Zuckerberg, but As we can see we’re not even close to something like that nor does it seem like people really want to embrace that based on you know How how the metaverse kind of
you know, crash and burned over the past few years and it’s not like even mentioned anymore. assuming those realities don’t come into play, at least within our potential lifetime, then yes, I believe us land will continue to be a valuable asset. So, therein lays lies the business potential therein lies your ability to execute, on it. but
in those circumstances that you do actually run into an assumption that is ultimately proven wrong. And it can happen within businesses. Then you have to pivot. So some of those things could be smaller, like maybe make a bet on a certain marketing channel. Hey, I think certain land investors are going to be oriented to here.
But yeah, it ultimately doesn’t work out. You know, even if you really, really push hard in that direction, you’re like, okay, you got to pivot away from that. So, you know, you can make different types of bets that your assumptions might be proven wrong. But, you know, the most critical one has to be what is your business model entirely based on? So that’s probably a point that I’ll return to again and again. And it’s a reminder for myself. So
I think we’ll end there and still not through these notes here yet. There’s just so much good stuff. With that in mind, SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding needs and Land Daily Diligence Facebook group. For review of your land deals, subscribe and share everybody. Take care now. Bye.
