How Alex Hormozi runs ads: give it away, sell the implementation
Hormozi codified the playbook the supplement scalers run. His own ad engine inverts the usual model: lead with the most valuable thing for free, monetise the implementation, and treat free content as the highest-ROI ad there is.
Core model
Free-first
value as the ad
Frameworks
$100M
Offers + Leads
Lead gen
Core Four
warm/cold/content/paid
Monetises
Equity
Acquisition.com portfolio
How Alex Hormozi (Acquisition.com) actually runs ads
Alex Hormozi teaches people how to grow businesses. He gives almost everything away for free - books, videos, courses.
The ads mostly promote the free stuff (like a book where you just pay shipping). Because the free thing is genuinely valuable, people trust him.
He makes his money on the harder part - investing in and growing the businesses of the people who follow him - not on selling the information itself.
The funnel
Walk the funnel, stage by stage
Click through the four stages to see how the hook, destination, offer and retention chain together.
Lead with the most valuable free thing
Ads promote a free book, free course, or a piece of genuinely useful content - not a paid pitch. The value itself is the hook, which earns attention and trust in one move.
Signature move
Value-first creative
The angles
The Core Four
Hormozi's lead-gen primitives. Paid ads are one of four - used to scale what already converts organically.
Contact people who already know you.
Why it works
The four levers behind the scale
Hormozi inverts the funnel: the most valuable thing is given away, which buys attention and trust at a price competitors won't match. The paid ad just amplifies the free value.
Steal this
The Alex Hormozi (Acquisition.com) playbook
moves you're running
The takeaway
The operator behind the playbook
Gruns, IM8, Mars and Create are running tactics. Hormozi wrote the manual: offers engineered on the value equation, value-first acquisition, and downstream monetisation that funds aggressive top-of-funnel spend.
Study the four to see the playbook executed; study Hormozi to understand why it works.
Sources
What we read to build this
Related Shuttergen reading
Where to go next
The connected pages that compound on this one.
Featured · Tier List
Top ad runners 2026: an interactive tier list of ~390 brands
S/A/B/Warning tier list across DTC, SaaS/AI, mobile games, gambling, fast fashion, fintech, dating, travel, insurance and telehealth. Multi-select by category; click a logo for the full take. ~390 brands, 22 min read.
ReadScaler teardown · Gruns
How Gruns runs ads: 40 personas, one gummy
Gruns scaled to a ~$1.2B outcome running 30-40 hyper-specific persona angles at once, each routed to its own advertorial with a steep intro offer. Walk the funnel stage by stage.
ReadScaler teardown · IM8
How IM8 runs ads: the premium flip on Gruns
IM8 ran ~1,200 ads concurrently to hit ~$100M in a year - flipping Gruns' green playbook into a sleek, red, clinical, celebrity-backed premium brand with quarterly-billed AOV tricks.
ReadInteractive · Briefs
The brief builder: score your creative brief, field by field
Most bad ads come from bad briefs. Eight weighted fields, a live score, and the verdict on whether you're ready to ship.
ReadRun the Alex Hormozi (Acquisition.com) playbook with your own ads
Shuttergen pulls the winning ads in your category, scores them by hook and structure, and remixes them into ship-ready variations - the persona-volume engine these scalers run, without the studio.
Get started free