Alex Hormozi on media strategy, AI for small business, and School hitting 30M users and $1B+ GMV

Alex Hormozi on media strategy, AI for small business, and School hitting 30M users and $1B+ GMV

Alex Hormozi runs Acquisition.com, a business accelerator and investment platform he built with his wife Leila that targets companies between $1M and $50M in revenue. The conversation covers three distinct threads: how he thinks about building a media company, where small businesses go wrong with AI, and the current state of his portfolio.

School and Acquisition.com numbers

School, the online learning and community platform Hormozi invested in during mid-2024, now has 30 million users and over $1B in GMV. Acquisition.com's advisory practice, which launched in January 2024, generated $36M in EBITDA in its first year. The book launch last year drove $105M in revenue across the business. Hormozi describes the portfolio strategy as having shifted from a cash-flow family office — where he completed roughly 24 deals in 24 months — to a tighter model built on three inputs: brand, capital, and operating involvement. He says he stopped doing deals where he's a passive investor. A large deal is reportedly 30 days from closing at the time of the conversation.

“Volume negates luck — that's on our wall at HQ. We have several hundred landing pages getting pushed against several hundred different ads, all being done programmatically with AI. School has 30,000,000 users now and we have billion-plus GMV — it's a very big platform. We're thirty days away from closing a gigantic deal.”

Media strategy

Hormozi's media operation started with a third-party agency producing three YouTube videos a week from webcam footage while he and Leila were traveling. Short-form came next, after someone cold-reached out to clip his long-form content when YouTube Shorts launched. He describes the content production cadence as marathon-style — filming a hundred shorts in a single sitting rather than spreading work across days.

The format he's most excited about for 2026 and 2027 is live interactive content, which he defines as two things: Twitch- or YouTube Live-style direct streaming, and formats that bring the audience in as participants. His current show, Scale or Fail, fits that second category. The premise is that entrepreneurs pitch their business, Hormozi gives them a full blueprint of what he'd do if he bought it outright, and they execute over 90 days.

On legacy media, his position is that it offers distribution he simply can't access otherwise. He points to Dave Ramsey as an underestimated example — 600 syndicated radio stations that most observers dismiss while Ramsey continues to dominate. The production question, he argues, is a barbell: either invest enough to build a genuine Mona Lisa, or compete on volume and value per second. The middle ground is the worst place to be.

On changing his positioning from "I have nothing to sell you" to selling books and services, his answer is framing it as the whole truth, not a half truth — he didn't have anything to sell, then he did.

AI for small businesses

Hormozi's diagnosis of where small businesses misuse AI has two parts. First, they use it to execute the wrong tasks faster — what he calls "doing dumb things really fast." Second, they get distracted and try to build AI-adjacent businesses instead of applying AI to the one they already have.

His preferred framework is shifting from org-chart thinking to workflow thinking: map every function, identify which workflows genuinely require a human, and remove people from the ones where AI can carry the load. For service businesses, he argues this creates a window where prices haven't adjusted yet, so margins expand dramatically. He suggests running that as a stealth operation — human-priced services, tech-cost structure — for as long as the market allows.

Acquisition.com is running several hundred dynamic landing pages matched programmatically to several hundred ads, built on a central data repository of sales copy, testimonials, and video collateral. On the organic side, one person on the highlights channel is pushing out roughly five mid-length clips and 15 shorts per day using AI to identify moments and insert CTAs automatically.

The failure pattern he flags most often is rebuilding software that already exists. The only exception he endorses is extremely narrow, single-use tooling where no existing product does the specific thing required.

Business advice and opportunity selection

Hormozi's framework for evaluating opportunities comes down to what he describes as: volume of activity multiplied by the leverage of the activity itself. He argues that the difficulty of building a successful restaurant and the difficulty of building a billion-dollar company are roughly equivalent in hours — the difference is the ceiling, not the grind. His advice is to pick based on what outcome you actually want, not on what sounds prestigious.

On risk and capital, he describes building a personal financial floor before making large bets. He frames it practically: if you lose the bet, what actually changes — what you eat, wear, drive, or where you live? If the answer is nothing, the argument for taking a higher-risk, higher-return path gets stronger. That logic, he says, is what allowed him to invest seriously in School.

On med spas specifically, he's openly looking for the right investment. His read is that the category is supply-constrained at both the business and talent levels, margins are "absurd," and CAC for many operators is effectively zero. The structural challenge is technician retention — injectors and laser specialists have enough skills to open their own door and take clients with them. His solution is a partner-firm compensation model, where giving technicians a majority stake removes the exit incentive.

Hormozi describes losing everything twice before the current run. He rejects the idea that founders are cleanly "pre" or "post" fall as too binary, but acknowledges that the experience of starting over shaped his current approach to capital allocation and risk.