Foundr

Most founders I meet can recite their follower count to the exact digit. Ask them their gross margin and you get a pause, then a guess. It isn’t carelessness. Somewhere along the way “the numbers” got filed under accounting, and accounting got filed under things you pay someone else to worry about.

Open your email dashboard and count the numbers staring back at you. Open rate. Click rate. Click-to-open rate. Bounce rate. Unsubscribe rate. List growth. Revenue per email. Spam complaints. Somewhere in that wall of percentages, most founders do the sensible thing: glance at one or two, feel vaguely fine or vaguely worried, and get back to actually running the business. I get it. I’d even call it rational, because most of those numbers don’t deserve your attention.

Somewhere in your email list right now, there’s a customer who loves what you sell. They’ve bought twice. They left a review. They’d happily tell a friend about you, and their friends probably look a lot like your ideal buyer. And most likely, you’ve never asked them to. Most founders I speak to have a referral program in the same way they have a gym membership. It technically exists. Nobody’s used it since January. There’s a link in the footer somewhere, and that’s about the extent of the strategy.

Selling a physical product and selling a course are fundamentally different problems. With a physical product, the thing speaks for itself. Someone can hold it, feel it, decide whether it’s worth what they paid. The email’s job is to get them to the product page and let the product close. With a digital product or course, the email has to do almost all of that work on its own. There’s nothing to hold. No packaging to admire.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. David Royce has a theory about success. It’s not about the industry you pick, the degree you have, or whether the opportunity looks good on paper. It’s about whether you’re willing to do the thing nobody else wants to do, for long enough to become the best at it.

You’re sending emails to thousands of people who all look the same in your ESP. Same list. Same segments. Same campaigns going out to everyone who bought a moisturiser in the last 90 days. And yet somewhere in that list, there’s the customer who bought it for dry skin, the one who bought it as a gift, and the one who’s been dealing with a specific skin condition for years. Three completely different people. One generic email. That’s the gap zero-party data closes.

Most email programs are built around one question: how do we get more people to buy? It’s not a bad question. But it’s an incomplete one. The brands that build lasting businesses aren’t just converting subscribers into customers. They’re converting customers into people who feel connected to something. People who recommend the brand without being asked. Who stick around when a cheaper alternative shows up in their feed. Who write in just to say they love what you’re doing. That’s community.

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.

You’ve done the hard part. You’ve written a subject line that earns the open. You’ve crafted copy that actually sounds like a human wrote it. You’ve built the automation, scheduled the send, and hit the button with the quiet confidence of someone who knows what they’re doing. And then it disappears into the spam folder. Not because your email was bad. Not because your offer wasn’t compelling.

We’ve all been there. It’s Black Friday week, and your inbox looks like a warzone. “50% OFF EVERYTHING!” “LAST CHANCE!” “DON’T MISS OUT!” Every brand you’ve ever bought from (and a few you definitely haven’t) is screaming for your attention at the same time. And what do you do? Delete, delete, delete. But seasonal email campaigns don’t have to feel like a desperate pitch.