Demand Curve - Growth Newsletter #231

The Growth Newsletter #231

10 Ways to Hook People (with examples)

Your ads, posts, emails, videos, presentations, and pitch decks can all be massively improved by spending more time and effort nailing the opener.

This newsletter contains an overview of the fundamental ways to do that.

Let's dive in 🪝

– Neal

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10 Ways to Hook People (with examples)

Insight from Neal's Newsletter and UNIGNORABLE.

A meh post with a strong hook will significantly outperform a strong post with a meh hook.

It’s just a fact of human nature.

We ignore everything that does not appear to satisfy our needs.

We’re constantly assessing each new stimulus (of which there are a near infinite amount these days) to quickly determine if it will fulfill our needs or not.

In developed societies, our needs have become primarily psychological (feel good) rather than physiological (get food).

We want to feel:

• Inspired and in awe
• Superior (the feeling around being outraged at some bonehead’s behavior)
• Like we’ve “learned” something
• Useful
• Entertained while we procrastinate doing work

We make snap judgments. Once that judgment is set, it becomes the anchor.

If you start weak, you have to work hard to get yourself out of the hole.

If you start strong, you have more leeway.

Success and failure compound

Every time someone fails to make it past your content's hook, they're less likely to get past it in the future.

Your reputation will precede you.

Some creators (like Huberman) write huge walls of text. He gets away with it because he’s built a reputation that what he posts is worth reading. To develop that, you must create things that people want to read consistently.

Here are the 10 hook types that get someone to consume your content:

Just remember, this applies to more than just social posts. It applies to ads, posts, sales emails, articles, podcasts, newsletters, and pitch decks

They all need to hook someone in or risk losing them.

Let’s dive into each of the hook types now.

#1. Establish credibility

Tell them WHY they should trust you.

• Your accomplishments: “I sold my last company for $600M.”
• Your efforts: “I spent 100+ hours analyzing the top hooks on LinkedIn.” – Naim Ahmed
• Someone else’s: “The 12 smartest things ever said by Simon Sinek.” – Eric Partaker

#2. Pique curiosity

Open a loop they want to close with some suspense:

Or the start of a story:

#3. Celebrate wins

People like to celebrate, and it gives them an obvious thing to comment.

• “Today is my 35th birthday.”
• “I just hit 250,000 newsletter subscribers.” ← combo of credibility
• “I just sold my company for $10B.” ← combo of credibility

#4. Embody the counter-narrative

Challenge a commonly held belief. 

• “People do not have short attention spans.” – Julian Shapiro
• “Everyone is wrong about the metaverse.” – Shaan Puri

#5. Surprise them

Surprising facts often go viral as they grab your attention, make you feel something, and make you want to share it.

• “75M baby boomers will retire by 2030.” – Codie Sanchez
• “The average age of a successful entrepreneur is 46.”

#6. Promise value

Tell them what they will gain from reading and why that’s important.

It can be as simple as these:

#7. Speak to their identity

Call out precisely who it’s for and why they should care.

•  Use a Barnum-style statement/question:

• Label them directly: “A rare find for my fellow movie nerds.” – Julian Shapiro

#8. Scare them a little

• Fear of Missing Out: “If you’re not mastering AI, it will master you.” – too many people
• Fear of Being Outdone: “I run a $400k/yr business with 0 employees” – Katelyn Bourgoin
• Fear of Doing it Wrong: “Most companies suck at onboarding new team members.” – Wes Kao
• Fear Itself: “LinkedIn can ban your account. YouTube can delete your account…” – Jake Ward

#9. Speak eloquently

Label a feeling they’ve had but haven’t know how to articulate. You want them to say either:

• “Finally, someone said it!”

• “That’s so damn true.” 

• “I never thought about it that way.”
  • “Your number one job as a parent is to provide unconditional love to your kids, because it’s the one thing that they can’t get anywhere else.” – Naval

#10. Show your face

We’re hard-wired to look at and respond to someone’s face. We look where they’re looking and assign more value to it. We mirror the emotion displayed on the face.

This can be done tastefully (just showing your face), or it can be done less tastefully like you might see on YouTube:

Combine them for max benefit

Treat these as the fundamental building blocks. They hit the core emotions, but you will often hit one or more of these with an opener.

For example:

And that's all folks. If you wanna dive deeper, I go deeper in my article. 

Otherwise, here are a few resources I’ve created to help:

• The 10 types of posts and how to use them. Use these to systematize your content creation process.
• 10 Copywriting Tips. 80/20 tips to improve copywriting.
• 7 Copywriting Frameworks (with cheatsheet). So you don’t have to start from scratch; these frameworks make “fill in the blanks.”
• Breakdown of the top 30 hooks on LinkedIn. Each hook is color-coded to show the smart thing each creator did to hook you.
• Breakdown of the top 26 hooks on Twitter. 
• An analysis of the top 20 female creator's hook. Due to the total lack of gender diversity of the top 100 creators, I created one for the top 20 women.
• 12 ways to hook with Thumbnails. A hook can be an image, too.

There's one week left to enroll in our last and best cohort of UNIGNORABLE, where we dive deep into how to grow an audience—of which hooks are a small but crucial part of it. Enroll now.

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Thanks y'all! 

Neal O'Grady

Justin Setzer