Your Best Marketing Strategy Is Giving Everything Away for Free

Full breakdown on why your best marketing strategy is giving everything away, why everyone’s BS meter is at an all-time high, and how trust replaced attention as the real currency in business. Full episode [here].

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owh6ev0h3S4

Give your best stuff away.

No paywall. No gatekeeping. No opt-in required. Just take the thing you know better than almost anyone in your market and hand it to people for free. Every instinct you have will tell you this is stupid. That you’re giving away the store. That if people can get it for free, they’ll never pay you.

That instinct is wrong. And it’s costing you.

Here’s what’s actually happening in the market right now. Everyone’s BS meter has gone through the roof. A generic marketing piece, a templated email, a polished ad — none of it lands anymore. Most people literally open their mail over the trash can. We’ve built an immune system against being sold to. And yet most businesses are still running the old playbook: gate the value, script the pitch, push for the close. It doesn’t fail because the product is bad. It fails because there’s no trust. And trust is the only currency that matters now.

I follow dentists and chiropractors on social media. Not because I need one. Because they create content that’s genuinely useful. That tells you everything about where attention lives today. You don’t buy it anymore. You earn it by being so helpful that people feel like they know you before you’ve ever had a conversation. Gary V wrote about this in Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. The Hormozis built an empire around it. The playbook is simple. Give away so much real value that when someone is finally ready to make a buying decision, you’re not one of five options. You’re the only one. That’s my person. That’s my realtor. That’s my dentist. Not because you pitched them. Because you showed up for months or years before the transaction ever existed.

The Fear That Keeps People From Doing It

If I give it all away for free, why would anyone pay me?

Because the person who was going to do it themselves was always going to do it themselves. They would have found the information with or without you. You didn’t lose a customer. You never had one. But the person who wants to hire an expert — they’re doing research. They’re consuming content. They’re deciding who they trust. And if they’ve spent weeks or months watching you explain things honestly, with no agenda, no paywall, no hidden upsell — you’ve already won. By the time they get on your calendar, the sales conversation isn’t a pitch. It’s a formality.

I’ve experienced this firsthand. Broker owners get on my calendar and jump into the conversation like we’ve known each other for years. They reference something about my family, my stance on the industry, my journey. It catches me off guard. I’ll say, have we met before? And they’ll say, no, I just listen to everything you put out. That relationship was built entirely through free content. No ad spend. No funnel. No gated PDF. Just value, given consistently, with no expectation of return.

And here’s the part nobody talks about. If someone consumes your content and decides they don’t like you or disagree with your perspective — they’ll never end up on your calendar in the first place. Which means you never waste time with someone who was never going to do business with you. Free content doesn’t just attract the right people. It filters out the wrong ones.

What Happens When You Actually Do It

When we decided to open source all of our forms at eXp, it was a last-minute call. We did it out of genuine love for the industry during one of the most confusing moments in real estate history. No strategy. No conversion play. Just: here, this will help.

Twelve, eighteen, twenty-four months later, people joined us specifically because of that moment. They said you gave me something of extreme value when I didn’t know what to do, and when I was ready to make a move, you were extreme top of mind. We didn’t ask for anything. We didn’t gate it behind a signup form. We just gave it away. And the trust it built converted harder than any marketing campaign we could have designed.

That’s the thing people miss. The trust-building cycle doesn’t start when someone fills out a lead form. It starts months or years earlier, when they’re passively consuming, when they’re just curious, when they have no intention of buying anything. And if you’re the one showing up with real value during that window — not a pitch, not a teaser, not a “DM me for more” — you own that relationship before the competition even knows the person exists.

The Takeaway

Take your best stuff and give it away. Create how-to guides. Remove the paywall. Stop gatekeeping your expertise. Build trust so far ahead of the buying decision that by the time someone is ready, choosing you feels obvious.

Your brain will tell you it’s reckless. That you’re leaving money on the table. That someone will take your playbook and use it against you. Ignore all of it. The businesses that win right now are the ones that lead with generosity and let the trust do the selling. Everything else is just noise dressed up as a marketing strategy.

— Leo

Also in this episode: why you should treat yourself as a sample size of one before creating any marketing, the most counterintuitive sales line that built my early career, why Chewy’s customer experience is the standard every business should measure against, and why every entrepreneur underestimates how much of an expert they already are.

Full breakdown on why your best marketing strategy is giving everything away, why everyone’s BS meter is at an all-time high, and how trust replaced attention as the real currency in business. Full episode [here].