cover of episode 5 Stages of Niche-Hopping | Re-Air

5 Stages of Niche-Hopping | Re-Air

2025/1/20
logo of podcast The Game w/ Alex Hormozi

The Game w/ Alex Hormozi

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Alex Hormozi
从100万美元到10亿美元净资产的商业旅程中的企业家、投资者和内容创作者。
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我将分享一个故事,解释为什么专注于一个领域至关重要,以及新手创业者常犯的错误。我曾经同时经营多个业务,包括健身房、牙医和脊椎按摩师的营销代理,结果却亏损累累。原因在于我缺乏专注,无法将已有的销售和营销技能转化为利润。 这让我经历了人生中最艰难的18个月。我卖掉了五家健身房,一家被合作伙伴卷款,另一家则面临巨额退款。牙医和脊椎按摩师的业务也因为缺乏系统化的运营而失败。最终,我意识到问题的根源在于我缺乏专注。 新手创业者通常会经历五个阶段:无知乐观、知情悲观、绝望之谷、知情乐观和成就。大多数人停留在第三阶段,也就是绝望之谷,因为他们无法坚持,总是跳到新的利基市场。 我曾经也犯过同样的错误,同时经营多个领域,结果不堪重负。后来,我痛定思痛,专注于健身房业务,最终取得了成功。 专注于一个领域,持续改进,比同时经营多个领域更有效。不要害怕挑战,要勇于面对问题,并找到解决方案。持续测试和改进你的流程,才能获得持续的成功。 不要被市场上新奇的事物所迷惑,真正的成功在于持续改进,精益求精。选择一个领域,深耕下去,成为该领域的专家,才能获得长久的成功。 我的成功并非偶然,而是源于我不断地学习和改进。我曾经犯过很多错误,但我也从中吸取了教训,并将其应用到我的商业模式中。 不要试图同时做很多事情,专注于一个领域,并将其做到极致,才是成功的关键。不要害怕失败,失败是成功之母。只有不断地尝试,不断地改进,才能最终取得成功。 我分享这些经验,希望能够帮助那些正在创业路上迷茫的人。不要害怕挑战,要勇于面对问题,并找到解决方案。记住,成功没有捷径,只有坚持不懈的努力,才能最终实现你的目标。

Deep Dive

Chapters
This chapter explores the five stages of niche-hopping: uninformed optimism, informed pessimism, the valley of despair, informed optimism, and achievement. It uses the analogy of dating to illustrate how many entrepreneurs fail to progress past the valley of despair due to a lack of focus and discipline.
  • Five stages of niche hopping: uninformed optimism, informed pessimism, Valley of Despair, informed optimism, achievement.
  • Lack of focus and discipline prevents entrepreneurs from succeeding.
  • The importance of confronting problems instead of running away from them.

Shownotes Transcript

Translations:
中文

I'm telling you this right now. It has everything to do what's going on in your head. You have to go through the shit and you have to figure out the stuff that they aren't figuring out. Every problem that you encounter, instead of running away from it, which is exactly what niche hopping is, exactly what new opportunity hopping is, you have to confront it. I want to tell you a story that will hopefully break some of your beliefs and I think will be one of the reasons that you, like, if you can internalize the story, this may be the way that you get to eight figures or seven figures, if that is your goal.

When I started in the information marketing agency world, Leila and I were dating. At that time, I had six gyms that I owned. I had Gym Locks, which was a done-for-you sales and marketing system where we'd fly out and launch other people's gyms.

And I had a dentist agency where I would generate leads for dentists. And I had a chiropractic agency where I generated leads for chiropractors. And guess what? I made no money. The reason I made no money is because I could not focus on anything. And so what happened there was I developed an initial set of skills, sales and marketing, and then immediately saw this whole new world of opportunity that was in front of me.

But what I had not developed yet was the character trait to associate with the skill, which was discipline and focus. And because of that, my lack of character, I was not able to reap the rewards or the fruits of the skill set that I had acquired. And so what ended up happening was probably one of the hardest year and a half of my life.

All right. I ended up having I sold five of the six gyms. I just shut one of them down. A partner stole all the money from the sale of those gyms. I had the gym launch that started happening, was working. And then all of a sudden we had chargebacks from one of the gyms that I shut down, which then wiped that account clean again. All right. The dentist that I sold did not get results because I did not have a system for them put together. I just generated leads on a sheet and just told them on calls what they needed to do. And they didn't do it, obviously.

And so I had two dentists that had paid me $10,000 each. I had chiropractors that had paid me $10,000. And all that was left is that all of the money that I used that I'd gotten from that was literally just to pay my bills and eat and do whatever. All right. And the issue was that I had no focus. As soon as I see an entrepreneur that comes into my world and they say, I have a couple of companies, I immediately know that they are a noob, that they are a noob.

And some of you may be hearing this right now and be like, well, I have a couple of companies. Cool. You're probably a new. All right. It's very unlikely that you have the ability at this point to have multiple entities. All right. Like I'm telling you this right now. And so the issue is there are five stages that you go through when you are a new. All right.

And I'm saying this, and if this affects you, I'm purposely doing it this way because I'm not going to help you unless we break some beliefs. All right. And that's what has to happen. And for some reason, I'll just make another sheet. All right. Here's the five stages. You got one. You got a little up. You got a down. And then you go up higher at the end. All right.

One in the beginning is called uninformed optimism. That means you're optimistic about something that's going to happen. You're excited about the opportunity that's in front of you because you see with your skill set, you imagine how much money you could make. And you start doing this math in your head and you put it on an Excel sheet and you get Excel rich and you sell yourself and you talk to your partner and you talk to your parents, you talk to your friends and all you do is get excited, right? Your dopamine starts sprouting. Oh my God, this is going to be amazing. Make so much money, right? Then what happens?

You get into it and then you go to here, right? And right here is called informed pessimism. You now know that it's not as good as you thought because now you have more information. You find out that just like every other niche, there's going to be issues. There's going to be constraints. There's going to be problems, right? Because guess what? They all have problems. And then you go to here.

This is called the Valley of Despair. This is where you're in the thick of it. You can't figure it out or like you're figuring out there's tons of hair all over it. And so what do you do? You jump to the next niche and you start all over again and you do the dance. You say uninformed optimism, informed pessimism, Valley of Despair, and you never make it past step three. Step three is where you have to go through the shit.

Right. And the only way to get through the shit is to focus. When you keep going into new niches, you never put your roots deep enough to learn the game. Right. There's a reason it's not Cairo launch, you know, dental launch and, you know, PT launch and whatever launch. Right. There's a reason that we chose not to do that because you can have a $100 million dental agency. You can have $100 million Cairo agency. You have $100 million PT agency.

What you probably can't have is three of them. And so you have to ask yourself, what is the reason that I think I need to do more niches? What's the reason? Is it because I think that's going to make me more money? No. Why? Why would it make you more money? Because wouldn't it be easier to just get more of the customers you already have and can demonstrate results for? Right. And so the next two steps of this are now informed optimism is step four. What that means is

At this point, you've gone through the shit and you've figured out the solution, right? And it's starting to work and you're starting to get into a rhythm. And then all the way up here, number five is achievement. All right. And that is where you realize the potential of this new opportunity. Most people never make it past here ever. And depending on the entrepreneur, they can continue to repeat this cycle for years.

years and they cannot figure it out. It's like the guy that you know who continues to date the same girl

identical, different chick every time, but it's the same chick, right? And they keep going and they keep doing the same mistake over again. They fall in love, they get really excited, and they actually realize they have to have a relationship and they bail, right? And they do the same thing over and over again. They never get to the part where they can achieve the potential of the relationship. It's the same thing in business. And until you learn the skill, you will never get to eight figures.

I'm telling you this right now. It has everything to do with what's going on in your head. You have to go through the shit and you have to figure out the stuff that they aren't figuring out. Every problem that you encounter, instead of running away from it, which is exactly what niche hopping is, exactly what new opportunity hopping is, you have to confront it.

You have to face it head on and you have to figure it out, right? If they can't sell over the phone, you have to figure it out. You have to make a better script. You have to make a better training. You have to do daily calls with them. You have to do your team, train their team. You have to think how many ways can I solve this problem, right? If they're not making enough money, it's because you did not create a mousetrap that was valuable enough for them to extract value from. And whose fault is that? It's yours, right?

Hey, Mosley Nation, quick break just to let you know that we've been starting to post on LinkedIn and want to connect with you. All right, so send me a connection request and note letting me know that you listen to the show and I will accept it. If there's anyone you think that we should be connected with, tag them in one of my or Layla's posts and I will give you all the love in the world. All right, so let's get back to the show. And so just like I'm putting this out there because

The number one thing I'm seeing right now, and if you guys were on my presentation yesterday, the third framework that I introduced was the niche duplication framework, which is how you can repeat this in as many niches as possible. And I put that in there because I know who I'm talking to, right? In their minds, an experienced mind, they think, oh my God, if I made $10,000 in one niche, I could do $10,000 in another niche because they don't even have the belief yet that you can make a million dollars a month in a niche. You can make $10 million a month in a niche.

Right. You just have to have that belief. All right. And so getting to another niche, tell me what problem it solves to double your operational issues, double the types and number of problems that you have to solve in real time. Tell me how that's going to make your life easier. Explain it to me. Make an argument to me.

Right. Because if the question is, I don't, you know, my, my niche is super saturated. Welcome to the fucking world. Right. It's all saturated. A hundred percent of it's saturated. Right. And the only way to win is to be better. And the way to be better is to stick through the shit is to go through the third step where everyone bails. Right.

Right. And on the other side of that is where all of the green grasses, the green grass is not only other niches, not only other side of the fence, it's not in the new opportunity. It's going through the manure and digging down and then letting it grow. Right. You got to work the field. That's how it works.

All right. I'm telling you this because I lived it. All right. I had six gyms, one done for you agency. And then I had three niches. I was serving. It was impossible. Same guy. All right. Six months later, I cut everything out and just said, I'm going all in on gyms. And why did I do that? Because my wife was like, if you don't pick something, she's like, I'm not going to be with you. And I was like, fuck. All right. And so maybe some of you need someone.

Maybe you don't have a, maybe you have no idea, whatever. Right. And so hopefully this can just be a voice to you from your past. All right. Because I feel like as I'm talking to some of you guys, I just feel like I'm talking to myself. Right.

And so I don't want you to make this mistake. And some of you will keep going around this merry-go-round over and over and over and over again. And you will not beat the level until you learn how to unlock the boss, right? And to put him on his ass. And the way to put him on his ass is not to do more different things, is to do more of the same thing. It's to get better. And every entrepreneur wants something that's new. The marketplace wants new, but the business world wants better.

And that's how you win, right? There's no shortcut.

And so you have to put in the work. You have to run beta tests, right? You got to say, okay, we're going to try this new script. We're going to take four of our facilities and have them test this new script out. You're going to make a little training for them, present it, get them to give you stats every day and focus on it. And then what happens? If it improves, great, roll it out to everyone. If it doesn't improve, learn from it, try something else, right? And like the reason Gym Launch grew the way it was is because every single step of the process, we tested and tested and tested.

Right. Even in this online model that we've been pushing right now. Right. We have we've already changed and tweaked and improved each part of that process. Like it wasn't like, all right, let's do chiropractors. You know, gyms, gyms are working. Right. Gyms are working. Let's do chiropractors. No. Right. We just stick through the shit. And so.

I say this with a lot of love and I'm trying to say this because some of you guys, I feel like I could be a big brother to. I feel like I want to give you a noogie sometime. But I'm saying this with love because I need you to get through this. I need you to get through this like creepy best in phase of new entrepreneurship of I want to do everything. You got to pick one. You can win at any of them, but you can't win at all of them. And that's the reason, right? Some of you have so much skill, right? You guys are so good at promoting. You're so good at selling, right? Some of you guys are great marketers, right?

You just have to use that and channel it into one channel. Otherwise, you're spread too thin. And that's why you feel like you're working all day. You're putting out fires all day and you can't move forward. Right. Imagine right now, all you had to do was get one person to be successful. And then all you do is duplicate that one person and just clone them and do it again and do it again, do it again. And I'll tell you, like right now, we're learning everything.

On the agency side, how to make you guys successful. One of the mistakes that I made early on, like with Alan right now, is that in the beginning, a lot of the messaging that I have when I talk to you guys was that Alan is a platform that you can run your agency on and make more money. In reality, Alan is a platform that supports the business model that I'm telling you.

Right. It's more switch to my model and you will make more. We just so happen to use out to extract the value. It is a piece that the model is the thing that's going to make you the money. Right. That's the game. And so some of you are not following instructions. You're half in, you're half out. You're like, I want to do half of things one way and half things another way. It's not going to work.

Right. It's like the girl who's trying to lose weight. She's like, well, I'm going to do keto on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I'm going to do a high carb, you know, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. You can't mix shit. Doesn't work that way. Right. Got to follow the sequence. The guys who are doing the best are just following the play. Right. Are following the plate. Some of you guys got fucking egos. Right. You're not hot shit.

myself included right but i'm saying like like i don't know how like and i'm i'm just so you guys know well i'll i'll leave there i'm gonna reach out a couple of you guys but you have to just so i want you guys to win and i don't want you to make the same mistakes i did and i want you to level up and the way to level up is not by doing more things it's by doing the same thing better and it's not sexy and that's the character trait you have to develop to get to the next level

So anyways, I hope that made sense for some of you guys. And if maybe it made sense for one of you, hopefully it made sense for one of you guys. And hopefully that's a turning point that you can say, you know what? I'm not going to do six niches. I'm going to pick one and I'm going to get really good at it. And that's what I'm going to do. And when it gets hard, I'm going to stick with it because I know that every other person who's gone and tried this niche gets to this point and bails.

And that's why they can't move forward. They all do a mediocre job and then try and spread themselves too thin. But I'm not going to do that. I'm going to be better than them because I'm going to win and I'm going to get through this piece. Because what it took to get you to here, which is learning how to self-promote, is not the thing that's going to get you to there, which is learning to be disciplined with your focus, with your attention. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast.

Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you've got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you've got HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale

and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap, R-O-A-D, roadmap, roadmap.