Alex Hormozi recently launched a book that sold more than three million copies in three days, smashing the record for fastest-selling non-fiction book, and raking in over $100M in sales.
It was wild.
It gets even crazier too, because his pre-launch marketing was cash-flow positive – meaning for every dollar he put into hyping the launch event, he pulled almost two out before the book was ever even released – and (the cherry on top) he also made the book available completely free, and still sold 3.6M+ paid copies in the first weekend.
Bananas.
I spent a bunch of time digging into his approach – reviewing dozens of marketing emails, analyzing offers, and watching hours of livestreams to figure out what we can learn.
The takeaways are useful for any product launch. We’ll talk about…
- What To ignore
- What People Are Missing
- Pre-Launch
- Launch
- Post-Launch
If someone forwarded this to you, and you liked it, you can sign up here. I’ve got more like this in the works.
1. What To Ignore
I’ve presented a talk based on these notes to a few different groups of people recently, and one of the first things that (justifiably) comes up is skepticism.
To give you an idea of just how wild this sale was in book-land, the previous record for fastest-selling non-fiction book was Prince Harry’s book, Spare, which moved about 1.4M copies in its first day.
Hormozi topped that in the first 90 minutes of this launch, and went on to roughly double it, selling ~2.8M copies in the first 24 hours.
Selling $100M worth of anything feels ludicrous, and people seem to look for reasons they could never do the same.
“How big is his audience?” they ask. “How much did he spend on marketing?”
Fair questions. But I’m going to encourage you to suspend them for a bit, and just focus on what you can replicate from his example, rather than things you can’t.
Because it’s true – Hormozi has a big audience, and a lot of money. He spend almost $4M marketing the launch alone.
BUT… We also know that those things don’t necessarily determine success.
Justin Timberlake, somewhat famously, had tens of millions of followers when his book launched back in 2018. Estimates are that it’s sold about a hundred-thousand copies since then. That’s ~3% of Hormozi’s launch weekend, with 14x the audience.
As for money, I mentioned this already, but Alex was able to make all of his marketing spend profitable.
He says he spent ~$4M marketing the launch, but made $7M in pre-sales as a result of that marketing alone. Daily spend looked something like this, according to him…
Based on these numbers, his marketing was, on average, returning ~175% of what he spent.
With those economics, it doesn’t matter how much you have to spend, you’re going to have an incredible launch.
It also means he didn’t need $4M cash sitting in a bank account (and neither do you). Mathematically, that first $22,806 was all he needed. In the real world, it’d be more (because money takes time to move between banks).
But the point here is simple – we shouldn’t let his $4M budget (or his 4M followers) scare us off.
Instead, we should take what we can learn from his example, and scale it up or down to fit our own resources.
So that’s what we’re gonna do.
And specifically, we’re going to look at the email campaign I got as a prospect heading into this launch. While it was just one of several levers he pulled, It was a big one. Thirty-four messages clustered over six weeks.
This is our bread and butter for the day…
2. What People Are Missing
I’ve gone through every single one of these emails, analyzing their goals, calls to action, where the links go, word-count, theme, and much else.
I’ve also watched hours of footage from the launch events, and taken notes on the different incentives used throughout.
After digesting all of that, I think the main thing people are missing when they talk about this feat is that it wasn’t really one launch. When you peel the layers back, it was three distinct campaigns, each with their own offer/goals:
- Pre-Launch: In which the main goal is to drive RSVPs to the launch event
- Launch: Focused on selling as many books as possible in a short time
- Post-Launch: In which the goal shifted to onboarding long-term users to Skool, his platform SaaS product.
Here’s the crazy thing… I think you can make a strong argument that this entire thing wasn’t really about the books at all. That it was all about building the Skool user base.
But we’ll get there in a bit. First… Let’s look at pre-launch
3. Pre-Launch
The pre-launch was about five weeks long, and was focused on two things (in this order)
- Driving RSVPs for the launch event
- Pre-orders
Now it might seem weird that pre-orders was the second priority, but consider this – Alex sold 3.6M+ books in the launch weekend live events. He sold about 70k books in pre-launch (so less than 2% of overall sales).
The live event was the big money-maker here so it makes sense it’d be the priority for pre-launch, and you see that in how they incentivized RSVPs.
The chart above shows how many emails were sent to me in the weeks leading up to launch.
Two quick notes on this:
- I don’t get many emails from Hormozi. Before this launch, I hadn’t gotten one since December ‘24, so I believe I’m in some sort of “less active” segment of his list and that probably has some impact on the campaign I got
- It’s hard to tell from this graphic but the launch-week emails go way off the chart at this scale (19 emails in three days)
The pre-launch was a slow ramp, with just one email per week for the first three weeks, ratcheting up to one every other day in the two weeks before launch.
What was in those emails?
Well, they were pretty short. Generally under 200 words. And they cycled between three different themes:
- Explaining The Book: Surprisingly, this was the least common theme. In the weeks leading up to the launch, Alex said almost nothing about what the book was actually about. Instead, he focused on…
- Hyping The Event: These emails were focused on the logistics of the event itself – for example, sharing calendar links, clarifying time zones, or hyping mystery guests.
- The VIP Offer: I said each phase had its own offer. For pre-launch, the offer was a series of incentives designed to make the event irresistible.
The image below gives a pretty good example of what the VIP offer looked like. Basically, if you signed up for the launch event, and either pre-ordered a book or referred one other attendee to the event, you got upgraded to VIP, which meant you got…
- Priority delivery of your book (even if they stock out at launch)
- A special livestream of the launch with Q&A access
- A bonus workshop
- A chance at winning 1 of 10 tickets to visit Hormozi
What’s interesting about this is that these are incentives pretty much anyone can replicate for pretty much any launch.
There was also a mystery gift that every attendee of the live stream would get. The phrase he used was, “Better than an NFT and less than a Bitcoin.”
One thing that struck me as I thought through these incentives was that they kind of fall into this interesting 2×2 matrix, where the incentive is either known or unknown, and the outcome – whether you’ll receive it – is too.
For example, when you promise all VIPs access to a bonus workshop, they know the incentive, and they know they’ll receive it if they show up.
A day with Alex is a known incentive, but unknown outcome (you may or may not win). And the mystery gift is the opposite – you have no idea what it is, but you know you’ll get it if you show up.
This mix of incentives creates both certainty that showing up should be worth your time (most incentives are in the known-known quadrant), along with enough mystery to pique your curiosity and hopefully get you to show up, even if the known-gift package isn’t enough for you.
The end result of all this was that there were a ton of people signed up for the launch (I saw figures everywhere from 500k to 1M+), and frequently more than 100k concurrent viewers during the event itself.
4. Launch
Ah, launch day. Let the onslaught of emails begin.
Over this three-day period, I got nineteen emails, and similar to the pre-launch, many were focused on nudging people into the livestream so they could see the offers presented long-form.
What were the offers?
Well, there were two (and this was brilliant).
At the opening of the launch event, Hormozi said that his goal was to appeal to two groups of people:
- The early-founder, struggling to figure it out
- The money-makers, who already run big businesses
He started with an offer for group one: Free access to the audio-boook, as well as a full e-course on his website that dives into the individual chapters. Also, a free bonus book, and 3 months of free access to his platform (Skool) followed by 90% off there for life.
Normally, I wouldn’t break down that offer in detail, since I don’t think the individual components are super important to you.
But there’s something really important happening below the surface here:
- First, that’s an incredibly enticing offer to try Skool (more on this later)
- Second, he’s building a lot of goodwill by giving all this value for free to the segment of his audience that doesn’t have a lot to spend. Goodwill that’s paving the way for the second offer…
At this point, he pauses his presentation, and basically says the following to the live stream (paraphrased): “Early-stage founders, I promised I would help you get closer to your goals today, and this (the entire book free + months of access to platform) is the best way I can do that. So are you going to be upset if I now incentivize the whales to buy a ton of fucking books?”
Thumbs up all around.
He then lays out the offer for the big dogs (again paraphrasing): “Buy 200 books for six-thousand dollars, and I will throw in a bunch of cool extras.”
This is how he moved so much volume so fast.
The particulars are important – when you bought 200 books, they would be donated to founders who needed them. You could have as many as you liked yourself (just pay shipping and handling). But the main goal of the 200 book effort was to give them away to people who couldn’t buy them.
I could do a whole other post on the individual incentives he offered that high-price group. There were exclusive playbooks you can’t buy anywhere else. There were bonus webinars. There was an AI that was trained on his personal notes from hundreds of consulting clients. And more.
The particulars are a little beyond the scope of this piece, but suffice it to say, it was a play straight out of $100M Offers, an offer so good you’d feel dumb saying no.
In fact, the offer was so good, that when I watched the live re-play of the launch a week or so after it happened, all I could think was, “Fuck, I wish I had been there live.”
I would have dropped the money in a heartbeat, and figured out how to make it make financial sense later.
They moved 952K books in the first hour, and eclipsed the old record for fastest-selling non-fiction book thirty minutes after that. By the end of the first day’s live stream they had sold 2.7M copies, and the next morning, just 24 hours after the official start of sales, they’d more than doubled the old record, at 2,917,443 copies sold.
Then, he did probably the ballsiest thing I’ve seen anyone do in a book launch.
He went back on livestream, and did it all again.
The way the launch was marketed, all the early hype was around Day 1. There was never really any indication there’d be anything after that. But looking back, it’s clear that the plan was always a three-day launch, each with a marathon livestream.
The story I heard was that someone saw the launch of his last book – someone he respected, who made a lot of money selling things on TV – and told him, “The event was great, but it was too short. You’ll sell more if you go longer.”
So in typical Hormozi fashion, he went all in, with almost twenty-four hours of streaming over the three-day launch.
Day 2 was almost an exact replay of the day before – he even gave the exact same three-hour talk, word for word, before diving into a few hours of calls with readers for a bit of variety.
Day 3 was almost all reader calls. This dude sat down at a table for an eight-hour live stream, talking to different business owners until they crossed the 3.5M books-sold mark.
The last thing I’ll note about the launch days was the email timing.
The image below is kind of hard to make out, but it represents the 24-hour period for each of the three launch days. The green bars are when he was live streaming, and the black spots represent an email that was sent to the list.
In the inbox, there’s not a lot of clarity around why emails were sent when.
But mapped like this, a few things are clear (and help me think about how to handle my own launches in the future).
Day one is mostly geared towards getting people on the live stream in time to see the offers revealed. After that, it’s about selling in US time zones.
Day two the emails almost all come outside normal work-hours in the US. To me, this looks like they’re trying to hit the other side of the globe – catch people there while they’re awake.
Day three, interestingly, there are almost no emails.
So prioritize US in the main launch, then make sure you get global coverage before ending things. Emails slow as the launch comes to a close, and there’s not a big push at the very end (which is interesting – I assume they’re weighing the trade-off between likelihood of buying vs pissing off the list).
5. Post-Launch
Post-launch, the focus shifted back towards the Skool offer I mentioned above. Over the course of about five days, the team sent a handful of emails, nudging people into that offer.
On the surface, that may seem uneventful.
But it begs an interesting question: If this was a book launch, why not use that time and leftover attention to sell more books?
The answer, from my perspective, is that this was never really about the books at all (if you can believe it).
Yes, $100M in book sales is (very) cool.
But the enterprise value of adding hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers to Skool outweighs even a book launch this big.
Besides Hormozi doesn’t really need the cash. He’s built his entire career on running cash-heavy companies and has taken tens of millions in owner distributions and exits.
He even said the 200-book sale was a valid tax write-off for people who bought, suggesting all the money is going to some kind of non-profit rather than his main company (I haven’t dug into how this works yet, but will).
No, the book launch was essentially a well-engineered, profitable PR stunt that grew his influence, proved he knows what he’s talking about, signed a ton of people up for Skool, and eventually put 3.6M+ books in the hands of entrepreneurs who need them.
…And every single one of those ships with a flier for Skool tucked into the front page.
6. Final Thoughts
There’s so much more to talk about in this launch. We only really looked at one marketing medium, and didn’t dive deep into the psychology of the offers, or how things like book donations or attempting to break a world record worked to rally people to his cause in a way a typical product launch can’t.
I’ll probably be spending a lot more time with his work in the coming months.
But for myself, I’ve taken a few big things from this…
First, it reset my frame around how much should go into a product launch. Even if you’re not aiming for a world record, this has helped me think more clearly about what’s needed to get people to buy.
Second, it was a master-class in incentives, and offer creation, and I like how much of that was something I could copy in my own way.
Last, there’s something very interesting here about thinking through your long-term goals, and working them into a launch as well.
