As a beginner, should I start with bottom-of-funnel content, and what should I talk about in TOFU, MOFU, BOFU?
When you're just starting, begin with bottom‑of‑funnel content—things you’re highly skilled at that only you know how to do. As you build an audience, move to middle‑of‑funnel content, where you talk more generally about how to do, sell, or apply the thing. Finally, progress to top‑of‑funnel content, discussing broader ideas and positioning yourself as someone who can win. This progression mirrors what experts like Hormozi did: he started with very specific gym marketing (bottom of funnel), then generalized to marketing in general (middle), and eventually talked about becoming a winner (top).
Cuz watching Alex Hormozi's content, he always mentions how important it is to be really specific with your content because the algorithm knows who to feed it to, and then funnels that into monetized things. There's a difference between what people say and what they do: he'll say you need to be highly specific, but then he makes videos all about how to be motivated. One is very top of funnel and at odds with the latter. However, he can lead with a concept like how to be motivated and then be really specific with the content, and that's great—I think he does so later on. But that's what top of funnel really means here: is your packaging created for a very wide audience? If so, your content tends to be pretty top of funnel, pretty general. He gets super deep on a lot of stuff, but reserves some of that for his coaching content, which is more exclusive. How to be motivated is definitely something we would call top of funnel. I would say I do kind of mid funnel nowadays. I used to do really bottom of funnel, which is like, you know, how to use stuff like this to make money. There's also really bottom of funnel highly technical content that's like, 'Hey, let me walk you through the exact step‑by‑step XYZ thing.' People like all of them. It's just a question of how many pieces of the world you can actually cater a high‑quality specific piece of content to. It's very difficult to cover a very wide surface area if you're making highly in‑depth 4‑hour tutorials on tools that have five searches a year. So, it's just about strategizing that way.
I really appreciate that feedback and I think you're right. All roads eventually lead to the top of the funnel — when you're an info product creator, you usually start with very bottom-of-funnel content that serves a specific need, then over the lifetime of the channel you ramp up to more mid-funnel tactics content, and eventually top-of-funnel strategy content. That's why someone like Alex Hormozi's videos end up being mostly motivation, or why big creators drift into vague generalisms — it's not because they're dumb, it's incentives; it's what's most profitable to make at that stage. But I'm in this for the long haul, so I don't want to just optimize for top-of-funnel content right away. I'll probably be doing more mid-funnel and bottom-funnel stuff going forward instead of leaning so hard into the agency-model content.
Personal brands follow Maslow's hierarchy: the base is posting consistently—e.g., seven times a week—so people recognize you have a brand. Once consistency is established, you can focus on the next steps like relationships, self-sense, belonging, etc. You can't skip steps; start with the foundation (consistent posting) and then adjust your strategy to attract the right audience. In my own career I've often jumped ahead, but I've learned to dial back, build the foundation, and then progress.
I start with a high‑level outline of what people need to produce economically valuable outcomes with the tool. I don’t dive deep into JSON, APIs, expressions, or functions—most of that isn’t used when building for clients. From first principles I ask what I actually need to deliver that makes people money; you barely need to know acronyms like HTTPS, HTML, CSS, or deep JavaScript. The outline becomes a simple high‑level view of the essentials that let people make money with the tool. If learners want to go deeper (they love “circle jerking” the tech), I point them to resources but don’t teach it myself. For the recent Claude Code marketing course I reviewed all marketing system deals signed over the last ~4.5 years, listed the systems, identified the bare‑bones knowledge needed to build them, ignored sub‑agents and complex permissions, and taught the 80/20 core, then pointed to other resources if needed.