• The purchase decision is almost entirely emotional: Nobody can try a course before they buy it. Your emails have to build belief long before the cart opens.
• Your list is your launch: Social reach is unpredictable. Your email list is the only audience you actually own, and for digital product creators, it’s where the majority of sales will come from.
• The nurture sequence is not optional: Subscribers who buy from a cold welcome email are rare. The ones who buy after weeks of genuinely useful content are not.
• Launch emails are a different discipline: Frequency goes up. Stakes go up. The writing has to earn that.
• Post-launch is where loyalty is built: Most course creators abandon their buyers the moment the cart closes. That’s the biggest missed opportunity in digital product email.

Why Email Hits Different for Digital Products

The Lead Magnet Isn’t the Strategy. What Comes After Is.

Building a Nurture Sequence That Actually Moves People

The goal of a nurture sequence isn’t to fill a subscriber’s inbox. It’s to progressively build belief: that the problem you’re solving is real, that your approach is credible, and that your course is the logical next step for someone serious about making progress.

The structure that tends to work best follows a simple arc. Start with the problem your audience is living with right now. Then shift to what’s possible on the other side of it. Then bring in proof, student results, case studies, your own story. By the time you mention the course, a subscriber who’s been through that arc isn’t reading a pitch. They’re reading confirmation of a decision they’ve already started making.

How long the sequence needs to be depends on your price point. A $49 ebook can convert from three or four emails. A flagship course or membership needs more runway, often six to ten emails over several weeks, before the cart opens.

Launch Emails: A Different Discipline Entirely

When the cart opens, the rules change.

The measured, value-first approach that works in a nurture sequence doesn’t carry a launch on its own. A launch window is a contained period of urgency, and the emails need to match that energy.

Open with a story, not a feature list. Use the middle emails to tackle objections directly. Too busy? Show how students fit it around a full-time job. Not sure it will work for them? Share a result from someone who looked exactly like them six months ago.

And close with honesty. A deadline that’s real, stated plainly. Manufactured urgency collapses the moment someone tests it. Real urgency doesn’t need to oversell itself.

One email a day in the final 48 hours is not too many. By that point, the subscribers who are interested are looking for it.

The Emails Nobody Sends (But Should)

The cart closes. The sales page comes down. Most course creators go quiet.

That’s a mistake.

A simple check-in email sent a week after purchase, asking how a student is getting on, generates a disproportionate amount of goodwill. Most buyers aren’t used to the creator showing up after the sale.

Progress-based emails that acknowledge milestones and encourage students who are falling behind have a direct impact on completion rates. And completion rates matter, because a student who finishes your course and gets a result is the most valuable marketing asset you have. They write the testimonials. They refer their friends. They buy the next thing you release.

Foundr backs this up with a 90-day results guarantee on Foundr+. That kind of commitment only works if the post-purchase experience is strong enough to deliver. The emails are a big part of how that happens.

Final Thoughts

Building a digital product business on email is one of the most durable models in online entrepreneurship. It doesn’t depend on an algorithm. It doesn’t evaporate when a platform changes its rules. It grows in direct proportion to how well you treat the people on your list.

The creators who do it best aren’t sending more emails. They’re sending better ones, at the right moments, to people who already trust them enough to open.

That’s exactly what Omnisend is built to support. Automation tools that handle your nurture sequences, launch flows, and post-purchase follow-ups without manual intervention, and segmentation that makes sure the right message reaches the right subscriber at the right stage.

And if you’re currently on another platform, switching costs less than you think, in time and money. In five days, Omnisend’s migration team moves every flow, list, and template across for you, free. You just show up when it’s done. For most founders, that switch means paying up to 35% less than they were before, with SMS starting at just $0.007 per message.

Foundr readers also get 50% off their first three months. Use code FOUNDR50 when you sign up and start building an email program your audience actually looks forward to.

The post The Email Playbook Every Digital Product and Course Creator Actually Needs appeared first on Foundr.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q&A with David Royce

Nathan Chan: Long before you sold your first company, you were a kid in school who thought he wasn’t smart. What happened?

David Royce: I struggled in school because I couldn’t focus unless I cared deeply. And when you’re a kid, you don’t say, I might have undiagnosed ADHD. You say, I guess I’m not smart. But in the sixth grade, a teacher, Mrs. Luft, really saw me. She believed in me before I believed in myself. From that point forward I worked incredibly hard to get good grades.

I didn’t learn I had ADHD until I was an adult. I’ve come to see it as a double-edged sword. In boring environments it’s brutal. In environments I care about, it’s a superpower. Sales and entrepreneurship were the first place my brain felt like an asset instead of a liability.

Years later, with no Mrs. Luft and nobody watching, he had to learn to do that for himself.

NC: Take us back to that first summer in sales.

DR: I got into pest control the way most people do. Accidentally. A friend told me he’d made $25,000 the previous summer selling it door-to-door. I drove out to Sacramento, and I was horrible at first. Didn’t sell anything the entire first week. Commission only, so I made nothing. Five days straight of zeros. I watched my teammates sell one to four per day while I was basically doing free cardio all week.

That weekend he didn’t call home. He went to a bookstore, bought half a dozen sales books, and put 90 minutes of study on the calendar every day.

DR: By the end of that summer I was the top sales rookie in the entire company out of 200 reps. Not because I was special. Because I was too stubborn to go home and admit I failed. Persistence is genius in disguise.

“Persistence is genius in disguise.”

NC: You got to the top 1% of 1% in your industry. What did you codify into the training program?

DR: Three things became the spine of everything I taught. Option closes versus yes-or-no questions. We’ll be in your area tomorrow at three or five, which works better? Both answers are in your favour. Then RAC. Resolve the doubt, lay down an ace they hadn’t heard, close again in a different way. And body language. Your body sells before your mouth does. I used to tell reps, you’re not losing because your script is bad. You’re losing because your face is saying please don’t hurt me.

NC: You were on track for investment banking. What changed?

DR: My last year of college I was planning to apply to investment banks. I figured my sales skills and my finance degree would tee me up nicely for M&A. So I asked my boss for a letter of recommendation. And he goes, why would you go work 80 to 100 hour weeks for someone else when you could start your own pest control company?

I’d never considered the idea. And this is embarrassing, but my first thought was literally, pest control doesn’t sound impressive. At the time, I thought success had to wear a suit and have a skyline.

Image versus opportunity wasn’t a new dilemma. He’d faced it at fifteen.

DR: I got let go from a pizza parlour at fifteen and ended up at McDonald’s because they were the only place that would take anyone. That’s where I learned the value of best practices. I owe a lot of my personal wealth today to a minimum wage job I considered embarrassing as a teenager.

His boss had just sold his own pest control startup to Terminix for $10 million after four years, and was offering Royce the same template. Royce had $300,000 saved from four college summers, originally earmarked for MBA school. That became his start-up capital.

DR: I was making $225,000 a summer. About half a million in today’s money. I asked my boss every pain point he had, and where he’d improve the business if he had the time. He gave me 30 things to fix. I had a finance degree, which is highly unusual in pest control. So I swallowed my ego and chose the opportunity instead of the image.

“I swallowed my ego and chose the opportunity instead of the image.”

NC: Year one you almost went bankrupt in Los Angeles. But not for the usual reason. What happened?

DR: Year one I learned you can be killing it and dying at the same time. We grew far faster than I could have imagined and almost bankrupted the company. The business model required me to pay my salespeople’s commissions in advance of the revenue coming in. A timing issue with cash flow.

He had planned for 4,000 to 5,000 new customers that year. He did 7,500. Nobody in the industry had ever done that many from a single branch.

DR: I had to go to multiple sales leaders and ask for an extra month or two to pay their bonus checks. I gave them an extra 10% interest on their money. Luckily they’d all had an amazing summer and were willing. Revenues are vanity. Profits are sanity. But cash flow is reality.

That scare taught him to fund growth differently. The workaround became the structural template across four companies.

NC: You sold three companies before Aptive, all to the same strategic buyer, and you never gave up your key people. Take us through how that worked.

DR: The asset deal structure was the key. Each time, I sold just the customers and the technicians servicing them. That was all the strategic buyers wanted anyway. They had their own brand, their own back office. They needed streams of recurring revenue. So I’d carve out my leadership team, my operations managers and my salesforce from the deal. That was the golden goose. Then I’d take the capital and start the next company with the same team, in new locations, better capitalised. No investors. No equity dilution. Same family, bigger stage.

NC: There are over 20,000 pest control competitors in North America. What let you grow seven to ten times faster than the rest of them?

DR: Three things. Our sales program. We built it into a machine of 3,000-plus people, and reps who switched over from competitors were producing 70% more in a summer than at their previous employer. Second, additional service features. I’d knocked on 60,000-plus doors in college, so I basically got a PhD in what homeowners complained about. Third, we invested early in software to improve efficiencies and gamify the business. Unheard of seventeen years ago for a blue-collar company. We built a sales app that ran tournaments nationwide and lifted productivity by up to 30% on tournament days.

NC: Why is there so much opportunity in blue-collar industries?

DR: Unsexy industries often have sexy margins. The Wall Street Journal calls these owners the stealthy wealthy. Among the top 0.1% of income earners in the U.S., people making about $2.3 million a year or more, roughly 43% of them are in what most people would call boring blue-collar industries.

There’s also a huge trend right now. Millions of baby boomers are retiring who own these kinds of businesses, and the majority don’t have anyone to sell to. Most are essential services with recurring revenue models. Recessions come and go. But bugs don’t read The Wall Street Journal.

DR: AI is making them even more attractive. AI can write code, analyse legal documents and automate a lot of entry-level office work. But it’s not unclogging your toilet anytime soon. It can’t climb on your roof. And it definitely can’t treat the termites in your walls.

“Revenues are vanity. Profits are sanity. But cash flow is reality.”

NC: You built one of the most talked-about cultures in home services. NCAA basketball court at HQ, golf simulator, retreats in Egypt and Thailand, skydiving, swimming with sharks, racing Ferraris around a track. Where did this philosophy come from?

DR: I read Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness when I was struggling with how to keep a family feel across the country. The lesson stuck. Tony sold his first company for hundreds of millions and was miserable because the culture wasn’t intentional. Culture isn’t vibes. It’s design.

We tried a lot of fun stuff after that, and it helped us stand out. But if I’m honest, perks are sugar. They’re not the protein. The primary driver attracting top talent was always the training program. They wanted to sell more than at any other company.

DR: The other thing I’m most proud of was giving away 25% of the company to our employees. I wanted to align everyone’s interests so they could benefit financially when I sold the business. We had over $500 million in annual revenue, and companies in my industry sell between one and three times revenue. So we gave away a nine-digit number to our team members at the exit. Many received six- or seven-digit figures.

I’ll never forget the calls. Lots of our team members paid off their mortgages and student loans. Another bought his parents a brand-new car. And I remember hanging up thinking, that was worth it. Turns out ownership is a far better retention tool than ping-pong tables.

NC: After three companies as CEO, you stepped aside at Aptive. How did you actually let go?

DR: For a decade, I’d been training my protégé. He’d joined my second year in business and worked his way up. Top sales rep, top sales manager, then running our sales recruiting program. When I started Aptive, I replaced myself with him as CEO.

When you replace yourself, you realise very quickly whether you built a company or a dependency. The hardest part wasn’t the structure. It was me staying out of it. There’s a temptation when you see something slightly off to jump back in and save the day. I had to learn that leadership at that level means letting someone else win, even if they’d do it differently. I had to stop being the hero and start being the architect.

Letting go of the CEO seat was one thing. Bringing in seasoned executives from much bigger companies was another, and that lesson cost him an exit.

NC: What happened with the big-company hire?

DR: We hired a CFO who had worked at a billion-dollar tech company. On paper, incredible. So we gave him a lot of autonomy. But resumes don’t run companies. People do. He was used to having dozens of people underneath him and wasn’t aware of how all our expenses hit the business. That year, we’d launched a process to sell half of Aptive. We had initial offers from half a dozen buyers valuing the company between $1 and $1.6 billion. We were already missing forecasts, and the misses got bigger each month. One by one, every buyer dropped off.

DR: A few lessons. First, trust but verify. Second, never miss your forecast while running a sale process. Buyers hate it, and it hands them leverage in the negotiation. Third, when you do run a process, only about 50% of sellers find a buyer. That’s OK. You learn a lot about what buyers want and can improve before going to market again, just like we did.

NC: Last question. After four companies and twenty years, what do you want people to take from your story?

DR: Success has always been a moving target for me. I was sitting in a room with other entrepreneurs once, and someone asked everyone what their number was. How much is enough? At the end he told us we were all wrong. The right answer is, just a little more. No matter what goals we set, our brain goes, cool, now double it. Entrepreneurship isn’t really about a big exit or financial freedom. It’s the expertise, discipline and character you develop along the way. If you don’t enjoy the climb, the summit is going to disappoint you.

DR: I’ve always been most passionate about helping develop people. Gandhi said the sign of a good leader is not how many followers one has, but how many leaders one can create. If there’s a legacy I care about, it’s not the valuation. It’s the leaders we helped build along the way.

From a kid who thought he wasn’t smart, to a door-to-door salesman too stubborn to quit, to the founder of a billion-dollar empire built in an industry nobody else wanted, David Royce has always known one thing: the opportunity worth taking rarely looks like one.

The post How a Sixth-Grade Teacher and a Door-to-Door Job Built a Billion-Dollar Pest Control Empire appeared first on Foundr.

Short on time? Here are the key takeaways

• Zero-party data is given, not inferred: Your subscribers tell you what they want directly, which makes your targeting more accurate and your emails more relevant.
• Quizzes are the highest-leverage collection tool: A well-built quiz captures intent, preference, and context all at once, in a format people actually enjoy completing.
• Surveys fill the gaps: Post-purchase surveys and single-question emails surface insights your analytics will never show you.
• Preference centres give subscribers control: When people can manage what they receive and how often, they unsubscribe less and engage more.
• The data is only as good as what you do with it: Collecting zero-party data without acting on it is just form-filling.

What Is Zero-Party Data (And Why Is Everyone Talking About It)?

Quizzes: The Highest-Return Data Collection Tool You’re Probably Underusing

Surveys: How to Keep Learning After the First Sale

Quizzes work best at the top of the funnel. Surveys do something different. They fill in the gaps that purchase data leaves behind.

A post-purchase survey sent 24 to 48 hours after delivery is one of the most underused tools in ecommerce email. Not an NPS score in isolation, but actual questions: why did you buy this? What were you hoping it would do? How did you find us?

The answers tell you things your analytics never could.

You might find that 40% of the people who bought your supplement were buying it as a gift. That’s a segment you didn’t know you had, and it changes everything about how you market to them. The re-engagement email you’d send to a repeat buyer who wants it for themselves is completely different from what you’d send to someone who bought it for their mother’s birthday.

Preference check-ins, sent to your existing list every few months, are worth building into your calendar too. Ask how often subscribers want to hear from you, what content they find most useful, and whether anything has changed about their needs. It reduces unsubscribes and tells you where your content is drifting.

And don’t underestimate the single-question email. One question, two or three answer options, the reply feeds directly into their profile. Low friction, surprisingly high response rate, and genuinely one of the most underrated formats in email marketing.

Preference Centres: Giving Subscribers Control Builds Trust You Can Bank On

Most ecommerce brands treat the unsubscribe link as the only exit option.

That’s a mistake.

Between “I want every email you send” and “remove me from everything,” there’s a wide middle ground. A preference centre lives in that space. It lets subscribers tell you exactly what they want to receive and how often, rather than forcing them into an all-or-nothing choice.

The engagement difference is significant. Someone who manages their preferences is actively investing in the relationship. They’re not tolerating your emails. They’re curating them.

At minimum, a preference centre should let subscribers choose their topics, their frequency, and ideally their format. The mechanics don’t need to be complicated. But the option needs to exist, and it needs to be easy to find. Link to it from every email, not just buried in the footer. The subscribers who update their preferences are giving you data and signalling that they want to stay. Both of those things are worth making easy.

Turning the Data Into Email Programs That Actually Convert

Collecting zero-party data is the easy part. The harder question is what you do with it.

Every piece of data you collect should map to a specific segment, flow, or content decision. If it doesn’t change what someone receives or when they receive it, you’re collecting it for no reason.

Quiz answers should feed segmented welcome flows. Someone who identifies as a complete beginner gets a different onboarding sequence than someone who’s been running paid ads for three years. Both are on your list. Neither should get the same emails.

Survey responses should update profiles and shape future communication. If someone flags in a post-purchase survey that they were disappointed with delivery times, that’s not just product feedback. It’s context worth carrying into the next email you send them.

And combining zero-party data with first-party signals gives you the most complete picture. What someone told you they want, paired with what they’ve actually been buying and clicking, is more useful than either source alone.

This is where Omnisend does its best work. The ability to store custom properties at the subscriber level, build dynamic segments from those properties, and trigger automations based on specific answers is what makes zero-party data actionable at scale, rather than sitting in a spreadsheet no one looks at.

Final Thoughts

The brands that win at email in the next few years won’t be the ones with the biggest lists.

They’ll be the ones with the most useful subscriber data, and the systems to act on it.

Zero-party data gives you something paid acquisition and behavioural tracking can’t: a subscriber who told you what they need. A quiz answer. A survey response. A preference they actively chose. That’s not just marketing data. It’s a signal that someone trusts you enough to tell you the truth about what they want.

Build the tools to collect it. Build the flows to use it. And treat the information your subscribers give you with the respect it deserves.

That’s where Omnisend comes in. With custom properties, quiz integrations, dynamic segmentation, and automation tools that respond to subscriber-level data, it gives you the infrastructure to turn what people tell you into emails they actually want to open.

And if you’re currently on another platform, switching costs less than you think. In five days, Omnisend’s migration team moves every flow, list, and template across for you, free. You just show up when it’s done. Same power as the big players, with SMS now starting at $0.007, which for most founders means up to 35% less than what you’re currently paying.

Foundr readers also get 50% off their first three months. Use code FOUNDR50 when you sign up and start building an email program that earns its place in the inbox.

The post Stop Guessing What Your Subscribers Want: How Zero-Party Data Changes the Email Game appeared first on Foundr.

Short on time? Here are the key takeaways

• Community is built through consistency and voice, not just frequency: The brands whose subscribers feel like insiders aren’t sending more emails. They’re sending more intentional ones.
• Your email list already contains your most engaged people: The fact that someone subscribed at all is a signal worth building on.
• Shared identity is more powerful than shared discounts: People stay loyal to brands they feel part of, not just brands that occasionally give them a deal.
• Two-way communication changes the relationship: Asking questions, inviting replies, and responding when people write back turns broadcast into conversation.
• The metrics that matter look different: Open rates, reply rates, and forward rates tell you more about community health than conversion rate alone.

The Difference Between a List and a Community

Make Your Subscribers Feel Like Insiders

Ask Questions. Then Actually Listen.

Most email programs are one-directional. The brand talks. The subscriber receives.

Community requires the opposite.

The simplest way to change the dynamic is to ask questions and make it easy for people to reply. Not a twelve-question survey with a submission form. Just an actual question at the end of an email: what’s the one thing you’re still figuring out about this? What would you want us to make next?

When people reply, respond. Not with an automated acknowledgement, but with a real answer. This doesn’t scale to 50,000 subscribers, but for most ecommerce founders, even a handful of genuine email conversations per month has an outsized effect on how connected that part of your list feels to you.

Those people become your most vocal advocates. The ones who tell their friends, leave detailed reviews, and DM you when something lands for them. It all starts with being the kind of brand that actually listens when someone writes back.

Reply-based campaigns are a good format to build into your rotation. Send an email specifically designed to generate replies: “Tell us the one product you’d recommend to a friend” or “What’s the best thing you’ve bought from us, and why?” People enjoy being asked for their opinion, and the answers often surface insights you can use.

Community spotlights work well too, especially for brands whose products are tools, cameras, craft supplies, fitness gear. Featuring real customers in your emails creates social proof and signals that the brand is paying attention to the people actually using it.

Build a Voice People Recognise

Community coheres around identity. And identity in email comes from voice.

If your emails could have been written by any brand in your category, they won’t build anything beyond a transactional relationship. The subscribers who become genuine fans can usually identify a brand’s email from the first sentence. There’s a recognisable point of view. A consistent way of looking at things. A tone that doesn’t shift depending on whether this week’s email is promotional or informational.

Building that voice takes deliberate choices.

What does your brand actually believe about the space it occupies? What does it push back on? What does it refuse to do, even when competitors do it? What does it care about beyond selling product?

When the answers to those questions consistently show up in your emails, subscribers start to feel like they know you. Feeling like they know you is what makes them trust you enough to stay.

This doesn’t mean every email needs to be a manifesto. Most of them will still be promotional. But the voice should be consistent whether you’re launching a product or sharing a piece of content. The subscriber should feel the same presence behind every send.

The Metrics That Tell You If It’s Working

Community-building doesn’t always show up immediately in revenue. But it shows up in other numbers, and those numbers are worth tracking alongside conversion data.

Reply rate tells you whether the conversation is genuinely two-directional. If nobody is writing back, the door might not feel as open as you think it does.

Forward rate is one of the clearest signals in email marketing. When someone forwards your email to a friend, they’re endorsing you to someone they trust. A rising forward rate is a strong sign your content is hitting the mark.

List growth from referrals is worth tracking too. If you ask new subscribers how they found you, and a growing proportion say a friend sent them your email or shared it with them, that’s community operating as a growth channel.

And pay attention to unsubscribe patterns. A spike after a specific email type tells you something. Consistently low unsubscribes across content-led emails relative to purely promotional ones tells you something else. The brands that build community pay close attention to what keeps people around, not just what gets them to click.

Final Thoughts

The most successful ecommerce email programs aren’t built by the founders with the most sophisticated automation or the highest send frequency.

They’re built by the ones who made their subscribers feel like something more than a name on a list.

That’s achievable at any size. You don’t need a huge audience to build genuine connection through email. You need consistency, a real voice, and a willingness to treat the people on your list as participants rather than recipients.

That’s where Omnisend fits in. With segmentation tools that help you send the right message to the right people, automation that handles the transactional side so you have more space to focus on building relationships, and analytics that show you how your audience is actually engaging, it gives you the infrastructure to build both revenue and community at the same time.

Foundr readers also get 50% off their first three months. Just use code FOUNDR50 when you sign up and start building an email list that actually looks forward to hearing from you.

The post How to Use Email to Build a Community, Not Just a Customer Base appeared first on Foundr.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Leila Hormozi doesn’t talk about her past to shock people. She talks about it because she thinks it’s the point.

The co-founder of Acquisition.com has been open about the six arrests, the addiction, and the moment she stood in front of a mirror and decided she didn’t want to be that person anymore. Not as a cautionary tale, but as proof that the same capacity for excess that nearly destroyed her is exactly what built a portfolio doing over $250 million in annual revenue by the time she was 30.

Foundr CEO Nathan Chan sat down with Hormozi to hear how a personal trainer with $5,000 in her bank account became one of the most respected operators in online business, and what she’s learned about leadership, execution, and telling people the truth even when it costs you.

Q&A with Leila Hormozi

Nathan Chan: You were arrested six times in eighteen months. What finally made something click?

“It wasn’t discipline. It was complete pain.”

NC: You moved across the country, became a personal trainer, started from scratch. How did that phase build the operator you are today?

LH: I became a personal trainer. I walked to every gym that was within walking distance from where I lived. I got a job at the closest gym so I didn’t have to spend any money on gas. I had $5,000 in my bank and my rent was $1,500 a month. I just needed to make it work.

That period of selling, building client rosters from zero, and managing survival-level finances became the foundation for everything that followed.

LH: I am such a fanatic about leadership, starting with self-leadership, because you cannot lead others unless you can lead yourself. And that’s what kicked me off on that journey. Starting a business is just a vehicle for how I can help other people better their lives.

“You cannot lead others unless you can lead yourself.”

NC: You and Alex met on Bumble, and he pitched you on Gym Launch on the first date. What made you say yes?

LH: I said, the worst case scenario is I end up right back where I am now, needing to build up my client rosters again. I can accept that. And when else in my life can I do this with very little consequences?

The early days of Gym Launch were marked by one disaster after another: a fraudulent business partner who drained their bank account, a merchant processor that locked their funds on Christmas Eve, and friends who had quit their jobs to work for a company that suddenly had no money.

LH: I had burner phones with different accounts on them because that worked at the time. We scrounged everything possible.

NC: You scaled Gym Launch from zero to $50 million in twenty months. But Glassdoor told a different story. What happened?

LH: We had a 4.9 Glassdoor up until I learned a very hard lesson, which is that you cannot let inexperienced managers make hiring projections. We hired 35 people. We only needed five. I had all of the same desire that I do now. I just want to make an amazing place for people to work. I had the desire. I didn’t have the skill.

The day before she was supposed to lay people off, her director of HR texted one person and told her she was going to get fired. That person told the whole team.

LH: My Glassdoor went from a 4.9 to a 2.2.

NC: You’ve talked about struggling with wanting to be liked, and how that actually failed the people around you. How did you work through it?

LH: I desperately wanted to be liked and I didn’t know it. I came from the side of being incredibly empathetic, incredibly understanding. I had to go through going from there to probably swinging too far on the other side, then finding my middle ground.

I realized it’s really not better to be nice in that way, because the two personalities have the same effect on people long term. Whether I’m yelling at my team, or I’m being so nice I don’t tell them the truth, the same result occurs. That person doesn’t know what they need to do better.

The shift came when Hormozi had to let go of a close friend she had hired, someone she had failed to give honest feedback to until it was too late.

LH: I remember in the firing I said: if I could fire myself, I would, but I own the company. I hadn’t given them the feedback they deserved. And because of that, they lost respect from the teams.

I started following John Wooden’s stuff about seven years ago. I said, I’m the coach. What’s the coach’s job? The coach’s job is to tell you: you’re at a six. I need you at a ten. Here’s how to get there. And that changed everything for me.

“I was being deceptive to spare my own feelings of being uncomfortable.”

NC: There is a through line across everything you touch: Gym Launch, Alan, your SaaS company. Rapid, outsized growth is always the result. What drives that?

LH: There are two things you have to have. You have to be building what the customer wants: the offer, the money model, understanding the market. And on the other side, you have to say: how are we gonna make that happen? Most people put a lot of resources on the first side and completely underestimate how many they’ll need on the second.

When I think about business capacity, I think about financial capacity, personnel capacity, systems capacity, and thinking capacity. How many people wake up every morning thinking about this thing? You need all four in excess before you launch.

LH: Most businesses don’t fail because of a bad strategy. They fail because they have poor execution, and they have nobody to tell them what good execution looks like. Out of all the portfolio companies we’ve looked at, probably two of them were capped because of strategy. The other fifty, it was execution.

NC: You are obsessive about talent. What do most founders get wrong about building a team?

LH: A great environment can take a mediocre person and make them great. But if you are just starting your business and you don’t have that culture yet, guess who makes the culture? You are the culture. The CEO, the founder is the heartbeat of the business.

It was not until I realized that every single thing I did was heard through a megaphone and seen through a microscope by my team. They modeled all of my behavior. I’m thinking everywhere: they’re watching, and I’m teaching through my actions, not my words.

NC: How do you attract great people without a big brand or huge compensation packages?

LH: You have to know what your offer is to the marketplace as a small business owner. For me, I don’t want it to be money. I want it to be growth. In a fast growth company, if people don’t want to grow, they see every point of change as a threat rather than a challenge. I want people who see those inflection points as challenges.

I have a big people team: six people, looking to hire four more. A lot of companies would be triple my size before they had a team that big. But I believe in the employee experience the same way I believe in the customer experience.

Despite having no Ivy League pedigree and starting out at community college, Hormozi has built a team of former founders, seasoned executives, and high-growth operators drawn not by compensation but by culture.

LH: I just started these companies after I graduated from community college. But they come because of the offer we present: we are a place for people to grow, and we leave everyone better than they came in.

NC: Last question. What do you want people to take away from your story?

LH: Do you think we would have had the massive success without the massive failures? No. The same muscle that allows you to succeed at that level and take those risks also means you’re gonna fall on your face. It’s a rite of passage.

LH: I became obsessed with how to build an amazing team: a team that can get us not just to 50 million, but to 50 billion. And it all starts with understanding your team as much or better than you understand your customer.

From arrest warrants on kitchen tables to leading one of the most respected operator-founder duos in online business, Leila Hormozi’s story is ultimately about one thing: the moment the pain of staying the same outweighs the fear of change.

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