The Game with Alex Hormozi
One Step Away From Collapse (Here’s How We Fixed It) | Ep 960
09 Apr 2026
Chapter 1: What challenges does Joel face with his travel hedging business?
This is Joel. He runs a coaching and course business that teaches people how to basically use credit cards to get sweet vacations. The problem is that he's dependent on one platform. If that platform goes away, his business could die basically overnight. I'm Alex Ramozy, founder of acquisition.com, which helps businesses scale.
Chapter 2: How can Joel differentiate between demand-constrained and supply-constrained problems?
And so let's meet Joel.
Hey Alex, I'm Joel McDonald, founder of Just Get Out of Town, also known as J-Goot. Tell me about the business. So we help travelers turn everyday expenses into multiple bucket list vacations every year.
Chapter 3: What is the Kaleidoscope creative testing framework?
Our largest audience is retirees. empty nesters, and business owners. I would not have guessed that. That is really interesting. Okay. The way we help them is through something we call travel hedging, not travel hacking. We differentiate ourselves there. This allows travelers to stretch their vacation budgets three to ten times farther.
Chapter 4: How can Joel effectively boost sales and handle objections?
So what's the difference between hacking and hedging? Travel hacking basically requires that you turn 10 to 20 credit cards a year. And that's why it has such a bad association.
Chapter 5: What role does hiring a larger sales team play in scaling the business?
Travel hedging is choosing the two or three best cards for your individual spending profile and learning how to effectively use them.
So what's the current state of the business?
Our trailing 12 month average is 6.4 million. Got a 1.9 profit margin. That's about a 30% profit margin. ROAS is 4.5 to 1. And then our LTV to CAC is a very skinny 1.4 to 1. We'd like to change that. Yeah.
Chapter 6: What strategies can Joel use to diversify his customer acquisition channels?
So we want to have it happen. We've got about 12,000 clients that we've put through either our mini memberships or our high ticket coaching program. Our goal is to have 10,000 more in the next year. We'd like to diversify our advertising channels and start to include a lot more affiliate partnerships and charities.
I've got a goal of a million donated through partnerships with charities in the next year. Oh, cool. In order to do that, we're gonna need to double our revenue. So now tell me about how you get customers. Basically, like I said, it's a book funnel and 85% of our customers come from buying the book.
I'm familiar with book funnels.
Chapter 7: How can user-generated content (UGC) enhance Joel's marketing efforts?
Another 10% comes from conferences, meetups, guest podcasting. We're beefing that up. We're trying to diversify our channels. And then right now, affiliates and charity partnerships are kind of in their infancy, but we do get about 5% of customers there. So what are the problems, Roto? So our biggest problem right now, single channel advertising.
We're heavily dependent, like I said, about 85% on Meta. We're kind of hitting a ceiling at 100 grand a month. I spent 150 grand last month and it got 10% extra book sales. It is a loss leader.
Chapter 8: What actionable steps can Joel take to improve his overall business model?
It's currently taking us about six months to break even, even with the back end.
Yeah, second problem.
A lot of skepticism in this industry, largely because we are associated with travel hacking. A lot of people assume this is a lot of trouble to save 10 or 20%. The actual savings when you travel the Jay Gut way is more like 70 to 90%. When people plan a trip,
The odds of them getting a great deal on that trip, and they've already painted themselves into a corner, say they want to go to Italy in June. The odds of that being a good deal is kind of like placing a chip on roulette.
Yeah.
Most times it's going to be very expensive. Every once in a while, like one in 20 times, they get lucky. The Jaguar way of travel is you find the good deals. There are thousands of them out there. You plan your vacation around them, and it's like placing a chip on the roulette table after the marble drops.
Anything else that you have?
So knowing that you probably have more points than you know what to do with, but not enough time to figure out what to do with them, we put a little itinerary together that includes a Singapore suite that typically goes for five to 10 grand, apartment that's another five to $10,000 flight one way.
And we basically put an itinerary around the world that would normally cost about $70,000 for the five countries that we found. And we showed you how to do it on points for 1800 bucks out of pocket. Love this for us. So basically, we're going to send you from Vegas to San Francisco to Singapore to Abu Dhabi and to London and back home through Mexico City. Great images.
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