eil Patel is the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics. He assists companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and Viacom grow their revenue and traffic. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 online marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies in the world. He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 35 by the United Nations. Neil has also been awarded Congressional Recognition from the United States House of Representatives.
Neil Patel was born on April 24, 1985, in London, England. From the beginning, he had entrepreneurship in his blood, i think he adapted this qualities from his uncles from mother side who were all entrepreneurs, his mother who first worked as an unpaid teaching gig, later she also started her own daycare business, by all these influences he inherited the qualities of entrepreneurship from childhood.
He lived his entire childhood as a typical middle class family and he always wanted to change that but never got an opportunity but during his first year at John F. Kennedy High School, things started to get better. He saw his cousin who earned a little money by selling burned music cd’s to his friends,Neil also started to do the same but he noticed the income was only few bucks for a CD so he started selling black boxes.
In a very short span of time everyone in school recognised him as boy who sells black boxes
and he started capitalizing on the fame by purchasing cable black boxes in quantity on eBay and then selling them to his classmates as well as their parents. By this he made a few grands in profit.And very early he realised it was not long term income source nor a career and it was illegal to sell those.So he started searchig for new business options and he observed many of his school mates were fixing their cars with after-market parts so he decided to get into reselling automotive parts. He acquired up a resellers permit from the State Board of Equalization, which allowed him to buy car parts at a discount and sell them to other students.
Corporate Life
His income in the business was not stable so he decided to get a real job,but by then he was only fifteen so he could only get a job in local place which is Knott’s Berry Farm,in the park services department.but his real job over their is to picking up trash, emptying trash cans, cleaning restrooms and sweeping up vomit. But he used to earn more money for cleaning the restrooms when compared to the other jobs.After working for over three months he found another job at quality systems this did not give him a steady income but he earned a few hundred dollars in commision per sales, he was selling $1,600Kirby vacuums. He went door to door, trying to convince homeowners to let me clean their carpets for free. If they did, he would then sell them on the vacuum after shampooing their carpet. After doing this for a month or so, shockingly he sold a vacuum to an Indian couple. But after a week, reality kicked in, and they returned the vacuum.Realizing that an average american could not afford an $1,600 vaccum so started to search for a new oppertunities at that point of time his sister introduced him to his boss who was an oracle consultant,and he was surprised to know his income, this incident wake upped the entrepreneur in him.Then he started to brainstorm on how he could earn so much as an high school student.With no clue on what is oracle he started to looking for oracle jobs in Monster.Instead of looking for the job in Monster.com he figured out the working model of monster and that they were making hundreds of millions of dollars.He thought if he earn 1% of it that was enough as a kid. This led him to start his own job board called Advice Monkey. After spending $5,000.00 to build the job board, He launched it and learned that I have to market a site for it to be successful.
And he hired a Internet marketing firm and he realised that they were taking money and not doing any work, so he fired them and hired two more firms but in vain. He was exhausted with all money. So he decided to learn the Internet Marketing for himself within a few months Advice Monkey started to become popular, but it never succeeded because the site was not set up to take credit card transactions.
He used hear a lot of stories from his sister who is still working for the oracle consultant how much money he is earning so he decided to start his own oracle consultant company but Unfortunately, he had two major roadblocks in his way: he was nowhere near 18 years old, and he didn’t have a college degree. So with my sister’s help, he started taking general education college courses at Cypress Community College while in high school. His goal was to finish college in 2.5 years.
His first college class was Speech 101, in which he had to give three speeches on any topic of his choice. One of the speeches he gave was on how search engines work. After hearing his speech, one of the individuals in the class asked him if he wanted to consult Elpac Electronics on their Internet marketing strategy. Using his sales skills that he learned from selling vacuums door to door, was able to lock them into a $3,500 a month consulting gig. Realizing that I could make a lot of money and change my lifestyle by doing Internet marketing for companies, he decided to start up an Internet marketing company with my sister’s boyfriend.
His business partner and Neil got a bit lucky as the owner of Elpac had a son who owned an ad agency. The son heard about the results we provided for his father’s company, and soon enough more marketing contracts started coming their way.The Internet marketing company began to Blossom. Still being a kid, He thought he was “rolling in dough”. With the money he made, he started investing in a few other companies. invested around a million dollars into a hosting company called Vision Web Hosting that never worked out. wistfully, he lost all of the money he had invested into it.And again he started another company called Crazy Egg which created a lot of buzz around when it came around and he was evident that he would end up selling it for ten million dollars because they were getting so much interest from Fortune 1,000 companies.But he couldn’t get what he has asked for so he started pitching Crazy Egg to venture capitalists for six months,then he realized no one was going to invest in it. Because of this, They had no choice but to figure out how to make Crazy Egg profitable.Though they were not interested with the work in Internet marketing they kept it running because to cover up the losses in crazy egg .
He was going through a hectic schedule by working for almost 60+ hours and travelling for meeting up around 50 clients every week.And his hard work paid off crazy eggs started to do well financially.By this he understood how remunerative software companies if you give enough time to takeoff, any he was not enjoying the consultant job so he decided to create more software.Eventually he found out the other software companies didn’t work out very well beacause of two reasons crazy egg not only solves a unique problems but in a simple way.But he was not happy with crazy egg beacause it was not going to be a Billion company So he decided to start another company which happend to be Kissmetrics which also started to do well and he started few other ventures under it.
Neil was still working to build a billion company after starting a couple of startups he would be dedicated to the work on gift by birth which is to grab a ton of eyeballs onto the website.
