Get Leads: The Core Four
There are only four ways to let people know you exist. Pick one and actually work it.
AFTER ALEX HORMOZI
Nobody knows you exist
Most businesses do not die from a bad product. They die quietly, from being a secret. You can have the cleanest offer in your category and still go broke if the only people who know about it are you, your spouse, and the friend who told you to go for it. Getting leads is just the act of letting more of the right people know what you sell. It feels like there are a thousand ways to do this. There are four.
A great offer nobody hears about is a diary entry, not a business.
Two questions, four boxes
Strip away every tactic (the reels, the cold emails, the booth at the trade fair) and each one answers two questions. First: do these people already know you, or are they strangers? Second: are you reaching them one at a time, or many at once? Warm or cold. One-to-one or one-to-many. Two questions, two answers each. That makes four boxes, and every way of getting attention lives in exactly one of them.
Tactics are infinite. The categories underneath them are four.
A freelance accountant has been quiet for years. Now she needs work fast. She opens her phone and starts messaging former clients and old colleagues: people who already trust her, sent one by one.
Which box is she working?
Warm one-to-one is reaching out, person by person, to people who already know you. It feels unglamorous and slightly awkward, which is exactly why it is the most underused box and often the fastest to cash.
The warmest box is usually the emptiest, because working it feels like asking for a favor.
Warm one-to-one: the box you already own
You have a list whether you admit it or not. Old clients, former coworkers, the contacts sitting dead in your phone. Reaching them one by one is warm one-to-one, and it is where most people should start, because trust is already built and you are not paying to rent attention. The catch is volume and nerve. One message gets you nothing. A hundred thoughtful, specific messages get you a pipeline. The work is boring and personal, which is why people skip it and run ads instead.
The fastest lead is often a name you already have and have been avoiding.
A new ceramics studio has zero audience and no contacts in the city. The owner writes one careful blog post and one Instagram reel about her process, and publishes both to the public.
Before you read on, which box is this?
Posting free content is one-to-many, and it manufactures warmth at scale: strangers who watch your stuff slowly become people who know you. It is slow to start and compounds late, which tests patience more than skill.
Content is the only box that turns strangers into warm leads while you sleep, but it pays you back late.
Cold outreach: knocking on strangers' doors
Cold one-to-one is reaching out, individually, to people who have never heard of you. The cold DM, the cold email, the call to a business that did not ask. It scales further than your contact list because the world is full of strangers, but it converts worse, because you are starting from zero trust. It is a numbers game with a craft layer: the better your message and your targeting, the less brutal the math. Most people quit it after twenty no-replies. The ones who send two hundred eat well.
Cold outreach is rejection at volume. That is the price of a list bigger than your phone.
Four people each have ten thousand rupees to spend this month on getting attention. Each picks a different box and goes deep on it for thirty days. A fifth person spreads the same money and time across all four boxes at once.
Who most likely has the worst month?
Each box is a separate discipline. Beginners lose by sampling all four and mastering none. You only learn what works when you push a single channel hard enough to get a real signal, good or bad.
Pick one box. Work it until it produces or until you genuinely understand why it will not.
Paid ads: renting the crowd
Paid ads are cold one-to-many: you pay a platform to put one message in front of many strangers. It is the fastest box to scale and the easiest to lose money in, because you are buying attention before you have earned it. The appeal is obvious: turn on spend, get reach today. The trap is just as obvious: weak offer plus weak message plus weak targeting equals a fast, expensive education. Ads do not fix a bad offer. They pour fuel on whatever you already have, good or bad.
Ads multiply your offer. If the offer is a zero, multiplying changes nothing.
The Core Four (Hormozi)
This is Alex Hormozi's Core Four, from his work on getting leads. His claim is blunt and freeing: there are only four ways to let people know about your offer. Warm outreach (people who know you, one to one). Cold outreach (strangers, one to one). Post free content (people who know you, one to many). Paid ads (strangers, one to many). Two axes, warm versus cold and one-to-one versus one-to-many, give you four boxes, and every marketing channel ever invented sits inside one of them. The move is not to do all four at once. It is to pick the one box you can work hardest right now, push it until it produces leads reliably, and only then add the next box on top. Most people fail not because they chose the wrong box, but because they never fully worked any box.
Four doors lead to every customer. Stop window shopping and walk through one.
Lead magnets sit on top of all four
You will notice none of the four boxes is about giving away a free guide, a sample, or a checklist. That free gift, the lead magnet, is not a fifth box. It is bait you can attach to any of the four to make people more likely to respond. Cold outreach with a useful free thing attached beats cold outreach with a naked pitch. Content offering a free template pulls harder than content that just talks. We treat lead magnets in their own module. Here, just hold the frame: the Core Four is how you reach people. The magnet is what you hand them when you do.
The four boxes are the roads. A lead magnet is what you put in the car.
A consultant has been posting content for a year. It works: leads trickle in steadily and predictably. He wants to grow faster and is deciding what to do next.
What is the stronger move?
The sequence is: master one box, then add a second, then a third. Each new box compounds on the last. Adding them one at a time keeps the signal clean so you know what is working.
First make one box work. Then stack the next on top. Order matters more than ambition.
- There are only four ways to let people know about your offer. Every tactic lives in one of them.
- Two axes define the boxes: warm (they know you) versus cold (strangers), and one-to-one versus one-to-many.
- Warm one-to-one is the box you already own and most people avoid. Often the fastest to cash.
- Cold outreach scales past your list but converts low. Content builds warmth at scale but pays back late. Ads are fastest and most expensive.
- Pick one box and work it hard enough to get a real signal. Do not dabble in all four at once.
- Once one box produces reliably, stack the next on top, one at a time.
- Lead magnets are not a fifth box. They are bait you attach to any of the four (covered in its own module).
Your turn
Look at your own situation honestly. Right now, which of the four boxes are you actually working, and which are you just thinking about? Most people have a warm list they are too proud or too nervous to message. If that is you, start there this week: write down twenty real names of people who already know you, and send twenty specific messages, not a copy-paste blast. If your warm box is genuinely empty, pick the one cold box (outreach, content, or ads) you can push hardest for the next thirty days and commit to only that one. Name your box. Then go work it before you let yourself add a second.
Do not pick the box that sounds impressive. Pick the one you will actually grind for thirty days.
Want the whole story, the long version? Read the deep-dive essay
This module stands on Alex Hormozi’s work. The words, the examples, and the mistakes are mine.