The links I mentioned in the video:
👉 FREE 10-Day Crash Course on how I built my AI-powered paid newsletter business to a $5k+/month, working just 15 minutes/day
👉 Automatically import Substack subscribers to Kit
👉 Case Study: How I use Substack-Kit Automation to double my paid subscribers growth
Just recently, Hormozi launched his missing piece between the $100M Offers and the $100M Leads - the $100M Money Models. His webinar made me think about how I stack my offers on Substack.
I realized I already use some of these, as I described in this part of the QUEST. So I thought it might be a good idea to share with you my take on how I’d use his money models on Substack.
Here we go…
Hormozi shared 4 groups of Models:
Attraction offers - think lead magnets
Upsell offers - think core offer
Downsell offers - when they say no to the upgrade
Continuity offers - kind of what we do with paid subscriptions on Substack
The truth is, Substack’s paid subscriptions alone can be used within all of four groups.
Here’s my breakdown:
1. Attraction Offers
Get customers by offering something free or at a discount. Often, they also make money by offering a better deal at a higher price. Hormozi covered five.
Win Your Money Back: You set a goal for the customer and tell them how to reach it. If they reach it, then they qualify to get their money back or get it back as store credit.
How to adapt to Substack: Offer new paid subscribers a challenge tied to your newsletter’s promise (ex: “Grow 100 subscribers in 30 days using my system”). If they hit the goal, extend their subscription with one month for free or apply it as credit toward a founding upgrade.
Giveaways: You advertise a chance to win a big prize in exchange for contact information and anything else you want. After picking a winner, you offer everyone else the big prize at a discounted price.
How to adapt to Substack: Run a giveaway for a high-value prize (ex: free 1:1 coaching call, lifetime subscription, or access to your premium course). People join by subscribing to your free tier or upgrading to paid. After announcing the winner, send everyone else an exclusive “consolation” offer like 50% off their first year so the giveaway fuels both list growth and conversions.
Decoy Offers: You advertise a free or discounted offer. When the lead asks to learn more, you also present a more valuable premium offer. The premium offer includes more features, benefits, bonuses, guarantees, and so on.
How to adapt to Substack: Create a highly valuable lead magnet for beginner level. Put tons more value for advanced level in the paid subscription, it’s already presented next to your free tier. Promote a low-barrier entry like “Get my premium strategy checklist free when you try the monthly subscription.” Once they click through, show them the yearly or founding tier as the “smarter” choice framing it as way more value (extra bonuses, bigger savings, maybe a private Q&A or tools access) compared to the monthly which you can make much more expensive (annual discount of more than 50%). The monthly is the decoy… the yearly/founding is the no-brainer.
Buy X Get Y Free: You offer customers free stuff in exchange for buying other stuff for money. The more free stuff and the higher its value, the more people buy.
How to adapt to Substack: Bundle your subscription with irresistible bonuses. Example: “Subscribe yearly and get my $297 workshop free” or “Join the founding tier and get access to 3 of my tools I usually sell separately.” You’re basically stacking perceived free value on top of the subscription so the paid tier feels like a steal.
Pay Less Now or Pay More Later: You give people a choice to pay full-price later OR pay a discounted price now and get additional bonuses.
How to adapt to Substack: Offer a limited-time discount on the yearly (ex: “Lock in $200/year now + bonus templates, or pay $300 later with no bonuses”). Make it clear the price will go up, so early adopters feel smart for grabbing the cheaper locked-in deal while procrastinators pay more with fewer perks.
2. Upsell Offers
Whatever you offer next. Typically, more, better, or newer versions of what they just bought. These get you more cash fast. Hormozi covered four.
The Classic Upsell: You offer the solution to the customer's next problem the moment they become aware of it. You can't have X without Y!
How to adapt to Substack: When someone upgrades to paid, immediately offer the next logical step beyond the newsletter, like for example “Now that you’ve got my strategies, get the exact templates/systems to implement them” (sold in the founding tier). Basically: you can’t have the playbook (X) without the tools to run it (Y).
Menu Upsells: You tell customers which options they don't need. Then, tell them what they do need and how to get their value from it. You don't need that…..you need this.
How to adapt to Substack: Position the monthly as the “you don’t need that” tier - too expensive long-term, no bonuses, no locked-in savings. Then present the yearly or founding plan as the real value: “What you actually need is the yearly, because it gives you 2 months free + private bonuses + you stop worrying about renewals.” The upsell happens by reframing one tier as the obvious wrong choice.
Anchor Upsells: You offer your most expensive thing first. If the customer balks, you offer a much-cheaper-and-still-acceptable-alternative. No worries. If you don't care about X, this may be a better fit for you.
How to adapt to Substack: Lead with your Founding tier as the premium choice (positioned as “for serious people who want direct access, bonuses, and lifetime perks”). If someone hesitates, slide them down to the yearly - “No worries, if you don’t need private access, the yearly still gives you all the premium issues + bonus templates at a lower price.” The founding plan sets the frame so the yearly feels like a bargain.
Rollover Upsells: You credit some or all of a customer's previous purchases toward your next offer.
Since you already spent $500, I'll just credit that towards you staying a full year.How to adapt to Substack: If someone’s been paying monthly for a few months, credit part of what they’ve already paid toward a yearly or founding tier upgrade. Example: “You’ve already invested $30, let me roll that into your yearly plan so you don’t lose it. Upgrade now and lock in bonuses.” It makes the switch feel fair and frictionless instead of like double-paying.
Pick Your Price: You let the customer pick a price but suggest a range with more bonuses as prices increase. You can give whatever you want, but most people opt for X.
How to adapt to Substack: Frame your Founding tier as the “pay what you want (within a range)” model. Example: “You can support at $150, $250, or $500/year—each level gets the core subscription, but higher tiers unlock extra perks like private more strategy calls for 1:1 feedback. Most readers pick $250.” That social anchor pushes people upward while still giving them freedom.
3. Downsell Offers
Whatever you offer after someone says no. And by turning Nos into Yeses you make more money. Hormozi covered three.
Payment Plan Downsells: You offer the same product at the same price, but they pay some now and the rest over time. When do you get paid? Let's do half now and half then?
How to adapt to Substack: If someone bounces on the yearly or founding tier, offer them a lower price for the first year. If someone rejects yearly/founding, hit them with a first-year discount: “Not ready to commit at $200? No problem—lock in your first year for $120 (40% off). Next year renews at the normal rate.”
Trial With Penalty: You let customers try your product or service for free so long as they meet your terms. If they do, they have a better chance of becoming paying customers. If they don't, they pay. If you do X, Y, z, I'll let you start for free.
How to adapt to Substack: Present the annual with a discount and offer a trial, with a standard (higher) price after trial expiry (that’s the penalty). You can frame it like this: If they hesitate on yearly/founding - “Not ready to commit? Start a 14-day free trial of paid and see if it’s worth it before you spend a dime.” Make the trial feel like a payment plan alternative: “Think of it like a test-drive: you only pay if you stay. No risk, full access.” Then use the trial period to overwhelm with value: drop your best past issues, bonus templates, maybe a private welcome email—so when the trial ends, paying feels like the only logical move.
Feature Downsells: You lower prices by changing what the customer gets. I offer lower quantity, lower quality, lower price alternatives, or cut optional components entirely. If you're okay without a guarantee, I can knock off $400.
How to adapt to Substack: If someone says “no” to yearly or founding, offer a stripped version: Monthly = feature downsell → frame it as “You’ll still get all paid posts, but you’ll miss bonuses, discounts, and private perks reserved for yearly/founding.” Yearly discounted version → “Grab a lean version: just the core newsletter for $X/year (no Q&As, no templates, no 1:1 and tools access).” Free trial fallback → “Not ready to invest? Try 7 days of the paid newsletter—no extras, just the essentials or the “minimum”.” It’s basically saying: you can pay less, but you’re giving something up.
4. Continuity Offers
Provide ongoing value that customers make ongoing payments for-until they cancel. These boost the profit of every customer and give you one last thing to sell. Hormozi covered three.
Continuity Bonus Offers: Continuity Bonus. You give the customer an awesome thing if they sign up today. Typically, the bonus itself has more value than the first continuity payment. If you sign up today, you also get XYZ valuable thing.
How to adapt to Substack: When someone signs up for monthly or yearly paid, stack a bonus worth more than their first payment if they do it today. Example: “Subscribe today and get my $97 workshop free (more than your first month’s fee).” Or “Join the yearly plan today and I’ll throw in a custom GPT that usually sells for $200.”
Continuity Discounts Offers: 1st Month. Backend. Commitment. You give the customer free time, now or later, if they sign up today. How to adapt to Substack: 1st Month Free
How to adapt to Substack: Offer a free month of paid if they upgrade today (Substack supports these discounts, so you can set $0 for the first month). Backend Free Time / Commitment Discount → “Stay subscribed for 12 months and I’ll give you month 13 free.” (You can manually comp this via Substack’s “gift comp” feature. You can also give lifetime access to founding members).
Waived Fee Offers: First, you ask the customer to pay a startup fee as part of joining a month-to-month program. Then, you offer to discount the entire fee if they commit longer term. If they cancel inside the term, they pay the fee.
How to adapt to Substack: Frame monthly as having a “startup premium” and yearly/founding as the way to waive it. You increase the price of the monthly to the level of the annual. Then if someone asks, you offer a lower monthly fee (promo code), bundled with a mandatory one-time fee (via Stripe), which you can waive if they go to annual: How to present: “Month-to-month is flexible, but comes with a $50 startup cost. If you commit yearly, I’ll waive it entirely.”
Freemium: Hormozi skipped that because he thought it’s only valid for software, but it’s the very core of our creator business as well and Substack is no exception. You give something for free that is good enough to attract leads on its own so that you can upsell these people later.
How to adapt to Substack: Perfect fit for Substack, it’s actually in it’s core: Make your free newsletter so damn good it stands alone—share bold insights, viral Notes, maybe even lite versions of your templates. Then constantly tease the “locked vault” inside paid: “If you loved this, the paid version has the full playbook, private workshops, and tools my free readers never see.” Free is the bait, paid is the upsell.
All right!
We covered all of the money models from Alex Hormozi, but there's one big problem.
How to stack these offers on Substack?
Not all of them can be easily presented at the right time. Substack is great at presenting the monthly annual and founding tiers in the best possible way, but it doesn't fully offer the tools to stack offers like Hormozi suggests.
So I use a workaround.
It helped me double my paid subscribers growth in January 2025 and reach a free-to-paid subscriber conversion rate of 7.2%, much higher than Substack average.
Here it is: I automatically import my Substack subscribers to Kit and build sequences there, and I actually do most of the models in my Kit account.
I have a 10-day free email course about how to grow your first 1000 subscribers on Substack within three months.
This is my attraction offer.
It's followed by upsell offers and downsell offers.
My continuity offer is in the automatic email of Substack offering lifetime upgrade for paid members who renew their subscription for one more year.
Once again, the links I mentioned in the video:
👉 FREE 10-Day Crash Course on how I built my AI-powered paid newsletter business to a $5k+/month, working just 15 minutes/day
👉 Automatically import Substack subscribers to Kit
👉 Case Study: How I use Substack-Kit Automation to double my paid subscribers growth
Stay Unplugged!
Yana
P.S. I created this video from my own ideas on Hormozi’s stuff, but without recording a second. I used AI:
I professionally cloned my real voice with ElevenLabs so that I don’t have to record everything. Here’s how my voice sounds like:
I cloned my real behavior on camera with my real home office background using HeyGen so I don’t have to speak and edit for hours. Here’s how my hyperrealistic avatar feels like:
Now, Heygen has direct integration with Elevenlabs. It also gives me the full Virtual Studio where I designed the whole slide in my own brand style.
Imagine creating full-blown courses with it.
Spoiler: Businesses already do that!
This, and so much more awesome stuff I’m gonna show you in the QUEST LABS (coming in September;))
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