I Gained 5,000,000+ Followers with this Secret Method

Video

Summary

• I grew my audience by 5 million in less than 24 months, starting from less than 10,000 followers.
• To overcome the skill gap quickly, I chose to use money instead of time and looked into paying experts for shortcuts.
• I avoided seeking advice from celebrities or outdated coaches/gurus, opting for advertising agencies instead.
• It's key to select the right kind of agency: basic ones cost around $3,000-$5,000 per month, advanced ones up to $30,000.
• I initially hired a basic agency to force me to produce content regularly – three videos a week. This was to nail the basics and understand audience preferences.
• When you outgrow a basic agency's services, it’s advisable to part ways and look for a more advanced agency to learn nuanced skills.
• I opt for a six-month term with agencies, ensuring transparency on intentions and an extra fee for learning their decision-making process.
• The goal is always to train my team to eventually internalize the expertise and transition to a lower-cost consulting relationship with the agency.
• It's important to set a clear deadline for this transition and understand there might be a period of double costs, which ultimately builds your business's enterprise value.
• My approach is to co-create with the agency and gradually shift to our in-house team as their skills develop, eventually exceeding the agency’s output as they have more time and context.
• Clear upfront communication helps end agreements amicably and avoid what I call "the agency trap," which I learned after several poor experiences.
• To decide if using an agency is right, consider your balance of time and money. If limited on funds, you may learn the hard way. Otherwise, pay down the 'ignorance tax' with an agency.
• This method isn’t exclusive to one platform. I replicated it across YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, podcasts, and paid ads, each time following the same process for optimal results.

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting by hiring a basic advertising agency that fits your budget, but don't spend too much. Aim for one that charges between $3,000 and $5,000 per month. This will help you get into a routine of making regular content, like three videos a week. Getting this basic rhythm down helps you learn what your audience likes.

Once you feel comfortable and understand your audience better, consider moving to a more advanced agency. They usually cost more, but they can teach you the finer skills. When you hire them, be upfront. Tell them, "I want to work with you for six months to learn how you do it and then move to a consulting agreement." This way, you're clear about your plans and they know what to expect.

While you're learning from the advanced agency, begin training your team on these skills. This will likely mean a period of double costs, paying both the agency and your team. But think of it as building your business's value. After six months, if you and your team have learned enough, shift to a consulting role with the agency, reducing costs but keeping their expertise on call if needed.

Make sure this whole transition has a clear deadline. This keeps everyone focused and working towards making your team as good as, or better than, the agency's. Your team can become better because they have more time and understand your brand better.

Finally, don't fall into "the agency trap," where you rely on them too much and end up with poor experiences. If you don't have much money to start with, learn one platform well through your own efforts and then use the proceeds to invest in learning others through agencies.

With this approach, I was able to grow my audience across multiple platforms, like YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, and others. Always stick to the same process and keep improving from what you learn.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"No business owner should change their business for one client"

– Alex Hormozi

"Once your team has the same amount of expertise or more, they should be better"

– Alex Hormozi

"We want to start co-creating so they're making stuff for us and we're making stuff for us"

– Alex Hormozi

"The thing is is that when you do that you're actually building the Enterprise value of your business"

– Alex Hormozi

"Set the expectation up front which is I want to learn from you and I want to be transparent about my intentions"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

method that I use to grow my Audience by 5 million people in under 24 months and the crazy thing is is 24 months ago I had less than 10 000 followers and I knew nothing about YouTube Tick Tock Instagram Twitter or any of these other platforms and the reason that I was able to catapult to you know a top one percent Creator in that 24 month period is using this method that for some reason no one really talks about whenever I enter a new space whether it's trying to learn a new skill a new platform a new anything I realized there's a massive amount of skill deficiency that I have to overcome as fast assembly possible and so I can either deploy time or I can deploy money to save myself time so within the world of organic content I was like who can I pay to shortcut my path to getting to where they are so on one hand I could go to like celebrities and I did go to some of them and they would give me their strategies but it was like very personalized and tailored to them and I didn't think it would apply to like how I run acquisition.com in my daily life on the other hand there was like the coaches gurus Etc that I could go to and I didn't want to do that because they might be using something that worked like five years ago which honestly I see all the time they're like guys you've got to do hashtags on YouTube videos I'm like what are you talking about like this that's that's not true and the third option which I ultimately went with are advertising agencies and what an agency is is just a business that sells Services of advertising on your behalf I can pay someone to run ads for me I can pay someone to cut edit and distribute content on my behalf so what I want to do is help you decide whether or not you should use an agency and avoid what I call the agency trap there's different tiers of agencies there's the guys who just make stuff and then there's the people who are real pros contextually here for one brand on one platform a small one might cost three-ish maybe five thousand a month the more advanced ones are usually in the 15 to 30 000 a month so it's significantly more money so here's how I use agencies now and how you can too phase one is I get what I would consider a basic agency so long from getting into YouTube the first step I didn't was I hired three to five thousand dollar a month agency and they just got me to commit to doing three videos a week they just trimmed it which means you take out the oohs and Oz put an intro and a thumbnail the main objective of that first phase was just to get the basics down forcing me to create content on a regular cadence once I have more context because I spent three six months working with them seeing what the audience likes then I'm like okay now I want to learn everything so I go from beginner of learning the basics and doing the fundamentals to how do the top creators create on this platform no business owner should change their business for one client and so it makes sense for both me and the small agency or for you in a small agency to part ways at some point when your demands for what you want exceed their capacity so then I work with the much better more advanced agency who works with the top creators to learn all of the more nuanced pieces of the platform so rather than agree to their initial terms which is basically pay us as long as humanly possible and we hope you pay until you die this is exactly what I say gather round I want to do what you do in my business but I don't know how I'd like to work with you for six months so I can learn how you do it plus I'll pay extra for you to break down why you make the decisions you do and the steps you take to make them then after I get a good idea of how it all works I'll start training my team on it and once they can do it well enough I'd like to change to a lower cost Consulting agreement this way you can still help us if we run into problems are you opposed to this when you start that way I like it because you're starting with very clear intentions and you're saying hey I'm going to commit to six months this is what I want from you and I'm also saying I'm going to continue to pay you after the engagement's over for a much higher leverage much more profitable Consulting engagement so that's what a lot of agencies would ultimately want and if I need to pay a little bit more than the agency fee up front then I'm willing to do that I also understand that as I start to train my team on internally there will be a period of time where I'm paying both them and my team so you're paying twice the thing is is that when you do that you're actually building the Enterprise value of your business and you're building the asset that you own rather than being reliant on somebody else who eventually could if you wanted to cut you off and then you'd be dead in the water or what more realistically happens is they gouge you and they continue to raise the price because they can see how much money you're making from the thing with that new agency we ran the same play hey we want to learn from you we want to understand why you're picking these things we want to understand the decision making process Etc I start documenting what they're doing into our processes internally we want to start co-creating so they're making stuff for us and we're making stuff for us and eventually our stuff for us starts to be as good and eventually better than the stuff that they make for us and it should be because I'm only one client of many to them and I'm basically renting them as fractional labor with expertise at a premium once your team has the same amount of expertise or more they should be better because one they have more time because they're going to fully allocate their time to you and secondly because they will always have more context on your brand than an agent will by having more time and more context all we have to fill is the gap of expertise and so once we have the expertise Gap then the in-house team should be better than the Advan its team and then at that point you decouple and you let them go you want to make sure that you have a clear deadline for when you want to make that transition and this is good for a couple reasons one is because it sets expectations with them they can also see the LTV and you can talk in terms of that let's say it's six thousand dollars a month I'm committing to thirty six thousand dollars all right so like you're gonna get that for me as long as you're not an idiot but the real real is that your team also knows that you're like Hey we're one month down we got to understand this stuff in five months hey we're two months down we've got to understand this stuff in four months and so it drives you towards the outcome of getting your team up to speed faster now you have that deadline but what if your team's not as good as theirs by the time the deadline comes well in my opinion you either need to change the people or they're not teaching you everything that needs to happen because if they're low-skilled people are doing better than your team some who is a problem either them or you let's assume that the people are right and limit just a more complex platform whatever I keep going until our team matches theirs once our team match is theirs then I drop it off we downgraded to a Consulting agreement just for insurance one or two months later if we feel like we're not learning anything on the calls that we have from a Consulting perspective we cut it and we do so amicably because we set that as the expectation that's how I grew my YouTube so now let's approach the same concept but on a different platforms I didn't understand Tick Tock at all I didn't use it I wasn't on it I actually had an agency reach out to me how about which is not common for me to accept that but they said listen you do no work so from a value perspective the offer was we you already have enough content out there I can repurpose it and make shorts out of it I was like okay sure if you want to do all the work and involve me at nothing and just make content for me sounds good and so that's what they did and they started getting traction with the short videos and we're like okay this stuff works and then for me my director of brand actually had a super deep history on short form content and so normally I would have had that second phase where I would go for that premium agency but that individual worked at a premium agency and so I actually bought the Sops automatically and we were able to massively scale our output on short content within six or so months of working with that original agency and again we're on good terms with the person in the agency if you set the expectation up front which is I want to learn from you and I want to be transparent about my intentions and I want to eventually bring this in-house because it's my belief that my team will be able to allocate more time to my thing and understand my brand better and if they had your skills they will be able to do more output at higher quality than you could ever do you have to make a margin I don't I'm going to cover cost and get five times more output this is what I believe has married the best parts of agency and the best part of building an Enterprise and making a valuable business and avoided the agency traps so many people fall into myself included so the first agency experience I ever had was actually really good I then worked with like 10 more agencies and all of them were terrible and this is the exact process of what happened so reading directly from 100 million dollar leads step one they got me excited about all the new leads they would bring step two I'd go through an onboarding process that felt valuable and sometimes was step three they assigned their best senior rep to my account step four I saw some results step five they moved my senior rep to the newest customer step six a junior rep starts managing my account my results suffer so seven I complained step eight the senior rep would come back once in a while to make me feel better step nine the results still never got back to where they were before and I'd eventually cancel step 10 I'd search for another agency and repeat the cycle of insanity Step 11 for the zillionth time start wondering why I wasn't getting results like the first time so how do you decide if using the agency is right for you first off do you have more money or more time if you don't have any money then you got to learn it and it's going to take time and you know what that's part of life usually you master one platform you get some success you get a little bit cash flow and then you can more quickly pay to learn the other ones you pay down your ignorance tests faster if you have the money then for me it's always worth paying on that debt and that process is how we approached LinkedIn how we approach podcasts how we approach paid ads all of them I run the same Playbook