In $100M Offers, Alex Hormozi teaches readers the entrepreneurial skills of “how to make offers so good people will feel stupid saying no.” Specifically, Alex breaks down the steps to come up with a highly valuable and unique offer, offers examples, and teaches you how to enhance it using psychology.

Contents

Exec Summary

Pick a good market
Provide a unique value offer, that solves all the customers’ problems, adds real value, and price it very high
Enhance it with guarantees, scarcity, bonuses, etc.

FULL SUMMARY

About the Author:
Alex Hormozi is an American entrepreneur who started in the health and fitness industry, helping gym owners scale their businesses. He then sold and took capital and lessons learned with him to launch his own incubator to help scale other e-learning businesses.
Alex is also very active in many different social media platforms, providing helpful and free advice to a growing audience of business enthusiasts.

We also made a review of Alex Hormozi the man here:

Is Alex Hormozi Legit? 5 Red Flags You Must Be Aware Of

1. Focus On Skills Acquisition: It’s A Game You Can Learn

there is a difference between gambling in business and gambling in a casino. In a casino, the odds are stacked against you. With skill, you can improve them, but never beat them. In contrast, in business, you can improve your skills to shift the odds in your favor. Simply stated, with enough skill, you can become the house.

2. Pick A Good Market That Has These 4 Traits

Alex for four indicators to pick a good market:

Massive Pain, where people but not want but need or desperately need what he’s offering
Purchasing Power, with people who can afford your costly product
Easy to Target, since you must always be able to reach your target audience to pitch them and sell to them
Growing, which is like having a tailwind pushing you in the right direction (or supporting you when you’re struggling)

Alex says that the market is the most important element of success -more important than your offer or your sales and marketing skills (which both require most time and effort to learn).
Put in equation format:

Starving Crowd (market) > Offer Strength > Persuasion Skills

Serve A Niche Within The 3 Main Markets

The 3 main markets that will always exist because of the pain people when they’re lacking in them are:

Wealth
Health
Relationships

The goal is to find a smaller subgroup within one of those larger buckets that is growing, has the buying power, and is easy to target (the other three variables).

3. Start In A Proven Market (Leave Moonshots To Broke Dreamers)

This insight was truly fantastic.

There is an unspoken myth and search for glory in entrepreneurship of coming up with new things, exploring new territories, chasing huge “moonshots”, and “disrupting” old industries (Thiel had already said the “disrupt frame” is poor).

Instead of seeking the moonshots in uncertain markets, in his podcast Alex recommends that you start as an entrepreneur in a market of proven interest and demand because it’s more reliable, has better risk/reward, and gives you more realistic feedback.

The problem with untested markets is that they’re shots in the dark, it has higher risks, and you never get to truly understand if the problem is the market, or if it’s you.
Because while in a proven market you can get to learn and test your skills in a market you can trust to exist, you can learn more reliably.
If instead all you do is take random “moonshots”, you never get reliable feedback on your skills -and on what you need to learn and focus on-.

Alex’s goal is to make you money first, and if you want to make money choose a proven market.

4. Niche Down To Make Your Offer More Compelling (& Make More Money)

For 99.6 percent of readers below $10M per year, niching down will make you more money.

And it’s also almost always easier to serve fewer clients more narrowly.

table of increasing price tags for smaller niches

Image from $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No

Says Alex:

You want to be ‘the guy’ who services ‘this type of person’ or solves ‘this type of problem.’ And even more niched ‘I solve this type of problem for this specific type of person in this unique counter-intuitive way that reverses their deepest fear.”

5. The Grand Slam Offer: What Is It

The definition of a grand slam offer is:

It’s an offer you present to the marketplace that cannot be compared to any other product or service available, combining an attractive promotion, an unmatchable value proposition, a premium price, and an unbeatable guarantee with a money model (payment terms) that allows you to get paid to get new customers . . . forever removing the cash constraint on business growth.

The key is to position your product as in a category of its own.
That way you compete on value, rather than on price.

When the prospect cannot compare your value offer with anything else, you make the price.

Competing on value is the only way to make lots of money because price competitions are races to the bottom that eat all your margin away and leave you barely surviving.

To compete on value make your offer so different that you never have to explain why your product is different.

Example of Grand Slam Offer

This was Alex’s Gym Launch offer:

Pay one time. (No recurring fee. No retainer.) Just cover ad spend. I’ll generate leads and work your leads for you. And only pay me if people show up. And I’ll guarantee you get 20 people in your first month, or you get your next month free. I’ll also provide all the best practices from the other businesses like yours.

With that type of offer you save on advertising because more people take you up on it, you close more leads, and you can charge more.

The Only 3 Ways To Grow

At a high-level, there are only 3 ways to grow:

Get more customers
Increase their average purchase value
Get them to buy more times

In his podcast, Alex says that most people focus on #1, getting more customers, while often reducing churn rate to increase lifetime value, or making a great product that increases word of mouth is by far the most effective.

The Grand Slam offer helps with all three of them.

6. The Value Equation For Your Grand Slam Offer

Image from $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No

To make your offer as compelling as possible, you want to:

Increase the top 2 parts of the equation
- Dream outcome, what they need, wish, or want. It’s the gap between their current reality and their dreams (ie.: how much will I make)
- Perceived likelihood of achievement (ie.: how will I know it’s going to happen)
Decrease the bottom 2 part of the equation
- Time delay (ie.: how long will it take)
- Effort & sacrifice (ie.: what is expected of me?)

Alex says that most people, and him as well in his beginnings, focus on the top 2 with tools such as social proof, third-party edification, etc.
However, it tends to be a shortcut since it’s easier, and it’s lazier (and often more based on words and claims).
Beginner markets also fall for the trap of inflating and exaggerating their claims, and that tends to make the message less persuasive.

But remember that as Machiavelli said, it’s about perceptions, not always reality.

Focus On The Deeper Desire That Your Proposition Addresses

People all generally want the same things such as to be:

Respected
Loved
Perceveid as beautiful
Perceived as powerful
Increase their status…

However, those are only conduit desires to deeper goals.

For example, men don’t really want money as in “pieces of paper”, they want money for the status it gives them, says Alex (or for the freedom, sense power, purchase power of their dream toys, or better dating, I’d add).

So what they value most is not so much the conduit, but the deeper goal -ie.: their status-.

PRO Tip: Frame benefits in terms of status gained from the viewpoint of others

If the final goal is status, you can go one level beyond simply selling status.

You can instead show the status they most deeply want already from the point of view of someone else.

Example:

If you buy these shoes, your speed will increase by 4km/h. Your running buddies’ jaws will drop when they see you leaving them behind . . . they’ll ask you what’s changed . . . only you will know.

7. The 5 Steps For Grand Slam Offers

Now let’s finally get down to how to prepare your grand slam offer people feel stupid saying no to:

Step #1: Identify Dream Outcome

In Alex’s case, it was switching from selling gym memberships to outcomes.

In his words, he was selling the vacation, not the plane ride to get there.

So for Alex it was:

Lose 20lbs in 6 weeks.
Big dream outcome – lose 20lbs.
With a decreased time delay – 6 weeks.

Step #2: List Problems

Write down all the things people struggle with and their limiting thoughts around them.

Says Alex:

Think about it in insane detail. If you do, you will create a more valuable and compelling offer as you’ll continually be answering people’s next problem as it manifests..

In Alex’s weight loss case, the problems are:

Buying healthy food, grocery shopping
- Buying healthy food is hard, confusing, and I won’t like it
- Buying healthy food will take too much time
- Buying healthy food is expensive
- I will not be able to cook healthy food forever. My family’s needs will get in my way. If I travel I won’t know what to get.
Cooking healthy food
- Cooking healthy food is hard and confusing. I won’t like it, and I will suck at it.
- Cooking healthy food will take too much time
- Cooking healthy food is expensive. It’s not worth it.
- I will not be able to buy healthy food forever. My family’s needs will get in my way. If I travel I won’t know how to cook healthy.
Eating healthy food
Exercise regularly
…

List Problems As Part Of The Value Equation

You listed out each core thing that someone has to do.

Now, think of all the reasons they wouldn’t be able to do it, or keep doing it -or whatever they’re afraid of that may get in the way-.
Use the four value drivers as a guide.

So, each of the above problems has four negative elements that align with the four value drivers.
Such as:

Dream Outcome→ This will not be financially worth it
Likelihood of Achievement→ It won’t work for me specifically. I won’t be able to stick with it. External factors will get in my way. (This is the most unique and service-specific of the problem buckets).
Effort & Sacrifice→ This will be too hard, confusing. I won’t like it. I will suck at it.
Time→ This will take too much time to do. I am too busy to do this. It will take too long to work. It won’t be convenient for me.

Step #3: Solutions List

There are two parts in crafting solutions:

Transform problems into solutions: starting with “how to” is the simplest way for beginners to turn problems into solutions. For example, in the weight loss space the problems related to “buying healthy food, grocery shopping” turn into:
- . . . is hard, confusing, I won’t like it. I will suck at it→ How to make buying healthy food easy and enjoyable, so that anyone can do it (especially busy moms!)
- . . . takes too much time→ How to buy healthy food quickly
- . . . is expensive→ How to buy healthy food for less than your current grocery bill
- . . . is unsustainable→ How to make buying healthy food take less effort than buying unhealthy food
- . . . is not my priority. My family’s needs will get in my way→ How to buy healthy food for you and your family at the same time
- . . . is undoable if I travel; I won’t know what to get→ How to get healthy food when traveling
Name your solutions: make your name

Alex reminds us that it’s important you solve every problem.
Solving all problems is part of making an offer that they can’t refuse.

Step #4 Create Your Solutions Delivery Vehicles (“The How”)

This is what you’re going to deliver.

It’s the product, the meat of your offer, and you must make it good.

To begin with, think about all the things you could do to solve each of the problems you’ve identified.

In Alex’s original example of weight loss, some solutions to buying healthy food if he wanted to deliver the service 1:1 would be:

In-person grocery shopping, where I take clients to the store and teach them how to shop
Personalized grocery list, where I teach them how to make their list
Full-service shopping, where I buy their food for them. We’re talking 100 percent done for them.
In-person orientation (not at the store), where I teach them what to get
Text support while shopping, where I help them if they get stuck
Phone call while grocery shopping, where I plan to call when they go shopping to provide direction and support

You then need to start fleshing out your solutions to later see what makes the most sense and what’s the easiest and most profitable to deliver.
Alex proposes these questions

What level of personal attention do I want to provide? one-on-one, small group, one to many
What level of effort is expected from them? Do it themselves (DIY) – figure out how to do it on their own; do it with them (DWY) – you teach them how to do it; done for them (DFY) – you do it for them
If doing something live, what environment or medium do I want to deliver it in? In-person, phone support, email support, text support, Zoom support, chat support
If doing a recording, how do I want them to consume it? Audio, video, or written.
How quickly do we want to reply? On what days? during what hours? 24/7. 9-5, within 5 minutes, within an hour, within 24 hrs?
10x to 1/10th test. If my customers paid me 10x my price (or $100,000) what would I provide? If they paid me 1/10th the price and I had to make my product more valuable than it already is, how would I do that? How could I still make them successful for 1/10th price? Stretch your mind in either direction and you’ll come up with widely different solutions.

Image from $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No

Step #5a: Trim & Stack

Now you want to:

Look at the cost of providing these solutions to you (the business)
Remove the ones that are high cost and low value first
Remove low-cost, low-value solutions
Keep the ones that are:
- low cost, high value
- high cost, high value

If you aren’t sure what’s high value, then think of each solution through the lenses of the value equation and ask yourself what your prospect financially values, causes him to believe he will be likely to succeed, make him feel like he can do it with much less effort and sacrifice, and help him accomplish his goal and see the result he wants with far less time investment.

Step #5b: Put all the bundles together into the ultimate high-value deliverable

Let’s now put everything together.

Let’s review the offer for the example of “losing weight”, presented with this format: Problem → Solution Wording→ Sexier Name for Bundle → delivery vehicle (what we’re actually gonna do for them/provide)

Buying food→ How anyone can buy food fast, easy, cheaply → Foolproof Bargain Grocery System . . . that’ll save hundreds of dollars per month on your food and take less time than your current shopping routine ($1,000 value for the money it’ll save you from this point on in your life)

1-on-1 Nutrition Orientation where I explain how to use…

Recorded grocery tour
DIY Grocery Calculator
Each plan comes with it’s own list for each week
Bargain grocery shopping training
Grocery Buddy System
Pre-made insta-cart grocery carts for delivery
And a check-in via text weekly.

Cooking→ Ready in 5min Busy Parent Cooking Guide . . . how anyone can eat healthy even if they have no time ($600 value from getting 200 hours per year back — that’s four weeks of work!)

1-on-1 Nutrition Orientation where I explain how to use…

Meal Prep Instructions
DIY Meal Prep Calculator
Each plan comes with it’s own meal prep instructions for each week
Meal prep buddy system
Healthy snacks in under 5min guide
A weekly post they make to tag me for feedback

Eating→ Personalized Lick Your Fingers Good Meal Plan . . . so good it’ll be easier to follow than eating what you used to “cheat” with and cost less! ($500 value)

1-on-1 Nutrition Orientation where I explain how to use…

Personalized Meal Plan
5min Morning shake guide
5min Budget Lunches
5min Budget Dinners
Family size meals
A daily picture of their meals
1-on-1 feedback meeting to make adjustments to their plan (which is actually an upsell)

And then for the other problems:

Exercise→ Fat Burning Workouts Proven To Burn More Fat Than Doing It Alone . . . adjusted to your needs so you never go too fast, plateau, or risk injury ($699 value)

Traveling→ The Ultimate Tone Up While You Travel Eating & Workout Blueprint . . . for getting amazing workouts in with no equipment so you don’t feel guilty enjoying yourself ($199 value)

How to actually stick with it→ The “Never Fall Off” Accountability System . . . the unbeatable system that works without your permission (it’s even gotten people who hate coming to the gym to look forward to showing up) ($1000 value)

How To Be Social→ The ‘Live It Up While Slimming Down” Eating Out System that will give you the freedom to eat out and live life without feeling like the “odd man out” ($349 value)

Total value: $4,351 (!) All for only $599.

Compare this offer now to a mediocre “gym membership”.
This bundle does 3 things:

Solves all the perceived problems (not just some)
Gives you the conviction that what you’re selling is one of a kind (very important)
Makes it impossible to compare or confuse your business or offering with the one down the street

In Sum:

Step #1: We figured out our prospective client’s dream outcome.
Step #2: We listed out all the obstacles they’re likely to encounter on their way (our opportunities for value).
Step #3: We listed all those obstacles as solutions.
Step #4: We figured out all the different ways we could deliver those solutions.
Step #5a: We trimmed those ways down to only the things that were the highest value and lowest cost to us.
Step #5b: Put all the bundles together into the ultimate high-value deliverable.

8. Enhancing The Offer: Bonuses, Urgency, Scarcity, Guarantees, and Naming

The “perfect profit combination” is lots of demand, and very little supply, or perceived supply. The process of enhancing your core offer is designed to do both of these things: increase demand and decrease perceived supply so that you can sell the same products for more money than you otherwise could, and in higher volumes than you otherwise would (over a longer time horizon).

The chapters on enhancing the offers were a bit more well-known to me, both because these elements come from general psychology (Alex mentions Cialdini), and because it’s what most other marketers also teach or sell.

Some great tips:

Add up your bonuses to a total that’s bigger than the price of your offer
Pick catch names for the bonuses as well
If you can rhyme or alliterate your offer, do it (but don’t force it)
Identify a client’s biggest fears, pain, and perceived obstacles and reverse their fears into a guarantee

Image from $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No

MORE WISDOM

Pick a market and stick to it, so you can learn the ins and out (unless it’s a dying market, of course. But most markets tend to be neutral, so prioritize your learning)
Sell a very limited supply of 1-on-1 access such as direct message, email, phone, voice memo, Zoom etc. Create a very exclusive service level based on access to you (yes, unscalable), that you cap at a tiny number. Price it very high.
Never discount the offer when trying to close a deal because it teaches people that your prices are negotiable. Instead, use bonuses.

QUOTES

On accepting reality and working with it:

Crazy world we live in.
And you can either sit there and make “complain” posts about how people “ought” to be a certain way. Or you can take advantage of the way people are and capitalize. This book is for those people who want to be victors, not victims of circumstances.

On being right or being rich:

You can either be right or you can be rich. This book is for getting rich. If that bothers you, just put this down and go back to arguing against human nature. Hint: You’re not gonna change it.

CONS

$100M Offers is a fantastic book.
As a matter of fact, it’s THE most helpful and practical book I’ve ever read on entrepreneurship, so consider these some personal reflections and minor notes:

How truly applicable is the strategy of “charge crazy high prices”?

Says Alex:

the goal isn’t just to be slightly above the market price — the goal is to be so much higher that a consumer thinks to themselves, “This is so much more expensive, there must be something entirely different going on here.”
(…)
The goal should be to charge as much money for your products or services as humanly possible. I’m talking heinous amounts of money.

Of course that sounds ideal and it’s well worth to ponder how one may achieve or at least try that.
On the other hand, I’m truly not sure how many businesses and products can go for that.

Also, markets and opportunities follow some basic tenets of game theory.
Meaning that if everyone is trying to charge exorbitant prices, the guy who comes in and undercuts them all with a good product may end up making a bomb of money for appealing to a huge untapped market, with little competition.

It’s untrue that competing on price is a necessarily losing strategy

The book seems to paint a picture where competing on price dooms you to failure (while charging very high prices makes you wealthy and everyone better off).

Yet, I can think of several uber-successful, huge businesses that compete and win on low price.

Ikea, for example, took the world by storm with offers so good people feel stupid saying no because of their low prices.
Walmart drove any other retailer on the brink of collapse by making prices lower, not higher -Walmart’s mission statement is to “save people money so they can live better” (ie.: the opposite of charging them exorbitant prices).

So, OK these businesses are built around low pricing, fair enough.

But then again, how about “middle of the road” mass producers that trump the high-end, super pricey offers?

Because I can also think of several examples of companies with average or slightly above-average products swallowing the super-expensive ones.
For example:

Cheap automaker FIAT owns Ferrari
Volkswagen owns Lamborghini, Bugatti, and recently even the “Ferrari” of two-wheels, Ducati

Shocker, I know.

And just to drive that point home, Volkswagen literally means “car of the people”, an homage to his mass penetration and cheap prices.

I can also think of several cases in FMCG where producers of cheaper products dominate the market.

For example, I like chocolate.
And top-end chocolatiers with expensive chocolate bars are only a tiny fraction of mass-market chocolate producers such as Nestle or Ferrero:

The chocolate quality of Ferrero mass-products is average at best, but Ferrero is a multi-billion company bigger than most producers of expensive chocolate

It’s also not necessarily true that commodity sellers struggle

When was the last time that anyone considered the following poor:

Oil producers
Tobacco companies
Raw material miners such as Rio Tinto (one of Brazil’s biggest companies)

Many countries run on raw materials, which are commodities.
In some ways, banks also deal with what’s in many ways a commodity: money.

This is NOT to say “Alex is wrong”, don’t follow his strategy.

It’s just that, as usual, I’d stay away from over-generalizations.

And I would stay away from over-applying general rules that to make money you must necessarily be unique, in a category of one, or charge “higher than anyone else”.

There are more variables that go into pricing beyond “value”

There seems to be an assumption that value -and the value equation- is solely or mainly responsible for pricing.

It doesn’t seem to be the case, though.

In Alex’s own example of diet/exercise plan VS liposuction, the price, time, and skills to deliver the work do matter (also because those also happen to be entry barriers).

Anyone can write an ebook on dieting and exercising and many can help you with coaching.
But very few can perform the surgery for an effective liposuction.

You can bet that if in the future the liposuction can be done in 10 minutes, 10x better, and by a $100 robot that can do anything else, the price will decrease abruptly in spite the value increases.

Alex’s equation is still super useful, but if we want to be thorough, then… Yes, it’s not only value delivered, but your skills, effort, and costs of delivery do also impact pricing.

Sometimes oversells and some advice only works if you’re already established

Of course, some advice only works for some people who already reached a certain level.

However, it can feel a bit salesy/sleazy/fake to pitch it as a silver bullet while addressing the whole audience.
For example, says Alex:

If you don’t hate money, sell a very limited supply of 1-on-1 access. (…) But I promise you this – if you want to immediately make a lot of money, create a very exclusive service level based on access to you (yes, unscalable), that you cap at a tiny number. Price it very high. (…) You will make more money than you thought possible.

How can anyone really promise that, knowing that most readers have no expertise to price at all, let alone to price very high?

The List of Reasons “Why More Expensive Is Good” Felt Like Unneeded Justifications

There is a section that provides reasons of “why pricing your product as high as possible is good for all”.

Yes, of course, there are some advantages for all to price high.
But there are also some cons, and many reasons why a higher price can be better for the seller, than the buyer (duh! :).

But if you provide enough value to justify your high price, that’s fair!

So there was no need to list a whole bunch of reasons why high prices are good for the buyer.
It felt a bit like “preventive medicine” to avoid coming across as money-driven, and justifying one’s fair goal of making big profits.
And like psychological reactance.

Overall though, since any smart reader knows that “as high prices as possible” aren’t necessarily good for the buyer, it also felt disingenuous -and taking up space-.

REVIEW

$100M Offers is the best resource I’ve encountered on entrepreneurship and marketing.

I’m sure more experienced pro-marketers who know Dan Kennedy -from which Hormozi learned a lot-, John Carlton or other direct-offer marketers may find the book less groundbreaking than I did.

However, Alex puts everything together and backs it up with lots of examples and personal experience, so that $100M Offers can be a valuable tool for anyone.

Furthermore, Alex outgrew pure direct marketing and started focusing more on business systems, brand, product quality, and word-of-mouth marketing. So when you put it all together, Alex’s advice feels to me like a total package system for world-class business building.
However, $100M Offers is purely focused on offers. So to get more of that “brand equity” side, you’ll have to get into Alex Hormozi in general.

You can also see our review of Alex Hormozi the man here:

Alex Hormozi review: the good, the bad, the ugly

Is Alex Hormozi Legit? 5 Red Flags You Must Be Aware Of

Check the:

100 Million Offers: Summary & Review

Exec Summary

FULL SUMMARY

1. Focus On Skills Acquisition: It’s A Game You Can Learn