The 4 Ways to Build an Audience on Bluesky (Borrowed From Hormozi’s Wealth Playbook)

I watched Alex Hormozi’s video on the four proven ways to build wealth recently, and about five minutes in I realized something: his framework maps almost perfectly onto growing an audience on Bluesky.

His setup is a simple 2x2 — your money or other people’s money, crossed with your business or other people’s businesses. That gives you four paths: bootstrapping, raising capital, investing, and fund management. His core point: poor people stay poor chasing shortcuts, while the people who actually get rich pick one path and play it for a decade.

On Bluesky, the currency isn’t money — it’s attention. Your attention, and other people’s attention. Cross that with your content or other people’s content and you get the same four paths. Let me walk through them, because almost everyone on Bluesky is only playing path one and wondering why growth is slow.

Path 1: Bootstrapping — Your Content, Your Audience

This is what 95% of people do: post your own stuff to your own followers and reinvest the engagement. It’s the “fund the business from your own cash flow” path — no outside help, full ownership.

Hormozi’s honest about bootstrapping: it’s the slowest path, because you’re building the machine that makes the capital while building the machine that allocates it. He compares it to building a car factory inside the car. On Bluesky the equivalent trap is brutal: a great post shown to 80 followers reaches a slice of 80 people. You’re producing content (the capital) with no distribution machine to compound it.

The advantages are real, though — total control, no one to answer to, and everything you build is yours. If you only ever play this path: post consistently, post when your audience is actually awake, and accept that compounding starts slow.

Path 2: Raising Capital — Other People’s Audiences, Your Content

Hormozi’s second path is using other people’s money to grow your business faster than your own cash ever could. The Bluesky version: using other people’s audiences to grow your account faster than your own followers ever could.

This is the most underused growth lever on the platform:

Replies are your pitch deck. A sharp reply under a big account’s post puts your content in front of their audience for free. The fastest-growing small accounts on Bluesky are consistently the best repliers, not the best posters.
Starter packs are funding rounds. Getting added to a relevant pack means every person who taps “follow all” just handed you a slice of their attention. I wrote a full guide to starter packs — they’re the closest thing Bluesky has to venture capital for accounts.
Custom feeds and Discover algorithmically lend you strangers’ attention when your post earns early engagement.

The trade-off mirrors Hormozi’s exactly: when you raise capital, you serve two masters — your customers and your investors. On Bluesky, content that performs in someone else’s space has to fit their norms. Reply-guy energy in the wrong room doesn’t raise attention capital; it burns your reputation. Devil’s in the details here too.

Path 3: Investing — Your Attention, Other People’s Accounts

Hormozi’s third path: take your excess cash and buy small pieces of other people’s businesses. You don’t run them — you fund them, and the returns compound.

The Bluesky translation is the one almost nobody frames correctly: every follow, like, and repost you give is an investment of attention — and targeted investments pay dividends.

Bluesky’s follow-back culture makes this literal. Follow 50 well-chosen accounts in your niche and a meaningful chunk follow back — that’s a return on invested attention. Repost a small account’s great post and you’ve made an investment that tends to get remembered (and reciprocated). Hormozi quotes Carnegie — “put all your eggs in one basket and watch the basket” — but notes real investors make several concentrated bets where they have an edge. Same here: random follows are index-fund spray with terrible returns; niche-targeted follows are concentrated bets with an edge. That’s the entire engine behind growing followers for free.

The catch, just like real investing: done manually, it’s slow, and the research is the hard part. This is exactly what Agent Sky automates — the Similarity AI finds the accounts worth investing attention in, follows them at a safe pace, tracks which investments paid (followed back), and divests the ones that didn’t. A portfolio manager for your attention, basically. Free to sign up.

Path 4: Fund Management — Other People’s Attention, Other People’s Content

Hormozi’s highest-leverage path: raise other people’s money, invest it in other people’s businesses, keep a slice of the upside. Tiny personal check, enormous outcome.

The Bluesky equivalent is building the infrastructure that routes other people’s attention to other people’s content:

Curate a starter pack. You’re bundling other people’s accounts for other people to follow — and the curator gets visibility every single time the pack is shared.
Run a custom feed. Feed builders own real estate on the platform. The feed surfaces other people’s posts to other people, and your name is on the pipe.
Run a community/curation account. “Best of #SciArt this week” accounts grow faster than most original-content accounts, because they tap the whole niche’s output and the whole niche’s audience.

Hormozi’s warnings transfer too: it’s the most leverage and the most masters to serve. A feed or pack is a reputation product — curate badly and the community notices. But the GP economics are real: the curator often ends up bigger than any account they curate.

Pick Your Path (Hint: Stack Them)

Hormozi got rich bootstrapping, then invested, then raised capital, then ran funds — the paths stack as you level up. Same playbook here:

Bootstrap your content baseline (you need posts worth finding)
Raise attention through replies and starter packs
Invest attention via targeted follows — automate it with Agent Sky so it compounds daily without eating your time
Manage the fund once you know your niche: build the pack or feed everyone else follows

No president, no algorithm change is going to grow your account for you. But pick a path and play it consistently and the compounding does what compounding does.

Quick FAQ

What’s the fastest way to grow on Bluesky? Combining paths 2 and 3: replies under bigger accounts in your niche plus targeted, paced follows. Both put you in front of people who don’t follow you yet — that’s where all growth comes from.

Does the follow-for-followback strategy actually work on Bluesky? Yes, when it’s targeted — relevant accounts follow back at high rates; random ones don’t. Keep it inside Bluesky’s rate limits and paced like a human.

Are starter packs or custom feeds better for growth? Starter packs give faster bursts (one tap = one follow from everyone who uses it); feeds compound slower but keep working forever. Joining packs is path 2; creating packs and feeds is path 4.

Can I automate any of this? Path 3 automates beautifully — Agent Sky handles the targeting, pacing, and follow-back verification automatically, and signing up is free. Paths 1, 2, and 4 are where your human time actually belongs.