Neil Patel
Appearances
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
So the core team of Axiom has known each other for over 15 years. We've probably been working together for most of that time through multiple companies. So we're all nerds and we all are Linux nerds. So we actually met each other on IRC a very long time ago. And we were all building open source projects, tools and search and all these different things. And so we became friends like that.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And over time, I ended up at Canonical, where I was leading the desktop experience team for Ubuntu. And so essentially, as soon as somebody says, hey, you should hire some people, you obviously go to your friends. And so I had the opportunity to hire my friends from IOC over into Canonical, and we were spread out. there was somebody across, actually just across the world, they were everywhere.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And exactly how you'd expect engineers to behave, we were like, and we'll get it done within six months, right? Or eight months or whatever it was. The reality, though, was that for the API and the front-end side, we just ate the tech debt and we just repurposed it to make it work in that timeframe. I'm Neil Jagdish Patel, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Axiom.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And essentially, we always worked in those kind of remote setups, always being on ISC, talking a lot, discussing things, etc. And then going back and just executing those plans. And so actually, the core of Axiom is that we built a really amazing team at Canonical. When a group of us went over to Xamarin, when we could, we pulled a bunch of them over to Xamarin.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And then when we started Axiom, we knew on day one what probably the first seven or ten at least hires would be, who they would be. When you work with people for that long, they start filling the holes that you have. And so everyone is great at something, but you're going to have things which you just have blind spots, et cetera, which other people can fill.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And so once you get that harmony, you want to carry that forward because it just makes working so much easier. And then the culture is also there, like that remote culture being around for over a decade and a half that we had been doing it by then. The trust for that self-motivation, that get up and go on. Hey, anything on the floor I can pick up. I don't need to have permission.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
I don't need to talk about it. I don't need to do those kinds of things. And so it actually helps on the hiring side as well, because. as people go through and new people want to join this group, you're looking at them with those eyes and you're like, hey, whether you're a junior, whether you're senior, do you have those same elements inside of you? And are you going to help make that team better?
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
Are you going to fill more gaps that we have in ability, et cetera, and also share and learn and all the things that we've been doing just naturally over this much time?
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
Definitely built to scale and scaling in mind. So what I'd say is our data store, it's not one binary thing. It's pieces. And we've put those pieces together inside of a cloud. And that's really the way we always thought about building Axiom, where the ingest can be isolated here, storage can be isolated here, search can be isolated, etc.,
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
We looked at it at the time and when we were whiteboarding stuff, we had to kind of circle things away and say, this is okay to deal with when we have users. And then there was other parts which were very clear where if we don't deal with this well now, it's just going to be painful for every X terabytes we would have extra. Like we can see that is such a clear pain point that's going to happen.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And so on our side, we tried to plan it in that way, which was this was OK to scale later, maybe because you can just throw machines at it initially and you don't need to worry as much. Or maybe it's just going to be a problem and we have to defer it for a while until someone's actually using it in angle, right? Instead of just us theoretically thinking people use it.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
On the flip side, I touched on this with S3 and Lambda, thinking about how are we going to scale our ingest so we can write as many objects as we want to write into S3? What is the partitioning that works best for S3 on read? How do we avoid getting hot partitions, etc.? There's one thing changing a schema in a table, something really different changing the way a data store looks up blocks.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
for querying, right? It's one of those things where you don't want to come in afterwards and actually play around too much with that. You can always make changes but you don't want to completely change it, especially once you have users. We anticipated those issues, but we definitely ran into things which we didn't. We found the edges of Lambda.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
We found the edges of using S3 in the way that we use it. We were lucky enough to be able to talk to the S3 teams, the Lambda teams, et cetera, and we were able to basically figure out what those issues were, work around them. Our own load testing and things like that got more sophisticated over time.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
We started to learn about making sure that we tested not for the glorious, amazing batches the largest organizations were to send us, but also just hundreds and thousands or more of users of one app that's just sending data, individual events coming from the browser directly to Axiom, for instance. We also had to level up our testing, et cetera, as we kept on building Axiom.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
I think it's the architecture. I think now as we scale, the architecture is really showing off how pluggable it is and how reimagining what one of these data stores could be like by it being just parts inside of a cloud, AWS, Azure, it doesn't really matter. and how we can rip apart, piece it back together, put things in the middle.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
All the challenges are so naturally challenges of any cloud kind of systems engineer. It's cheap mode at this point where you get to just pick a service from AWS and say, if I put that in the middle, we're going to automatically get something X, Y, Z happen and that solves this problem or allows customers to do something they weren't before.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
We had on the whiteboard when we announced that we were pivoting and we did a sprint with the team and we were like, okay, we're going to build this data store. The first couple of things on the whiteboard were essentially the cloud exists with two underlines.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And the whole point was like, anytime we think that we're going to be special and try and build something ourselves, if AWS already does it or Azure does, There's no reason for us to build it. Instead, we should find how to make use of that and it will pay off in the long term. And I think we're seeing some of that paying off now.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
I'll be honest, I think like the one that sticks with me is we didn't get that initial product into the hands of people who would have given that feedback or advice to us fast enough. We corrected that so hard now where even features and things like that, we will try and get them into people's hands as early as possible for the earliest feedback possible.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
I wish I had known how important that was with the product we were building then, because I think we could have reduced the time to this version of Axiom by maybe even a few years, to be honest.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
That just sits with me because it's one of those things where it wasn't a clear thing for me because coming from open source, et cetera, I was so used to building and every commit would be built and put out somewhere. And so someone's always using it. And so you'd always be used to getting that quick feedback.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
When we got our heads down and we were building this initial vision, we lost that connection. And I think my team, myself, we thrive on that connection with a user on the other side or someone to give us feedback. And that was time lost, I'd say.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
The whole reason we made this data store and then we built the product around it is you can send everything to it. It's efficient and obviously that means that you're not going to have to burn holes in your pockets or anything.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
You can essentially have a recorded history of everything that's happening inside of your startup from day one by just hooking webhooks or trace data, whatever it is, you can just send it over to Axiom. We don't force you to tell us what you're sending, a schema or anything like that.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
The whole idea is that we think the future is essentially organizations that have this treasure trove of information as events across all these different streams, whether it's your customer support messages, whether it's product, whether it's traces, whatever it is. And the idea is for us is we then, Axiom's entire focus is we convince you to send us the data.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
We convince you to store it for us for multiple years. You're getting some value out of that data yourself because you know the data and therefore you may be using it for logging or building Stripe dashboards or whatever you're doing inside of Axiom. But now the onus is on us to go and give you things you never thought about that you could do with it.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And so much of the rest of this year for us is presenting back to the user that, hey, you trusted us with this initial part of the journey. Here's now all the useful things you can do with this data, which you may have not even thought Axiom is a place to do it. But now you can do that. So whether it's
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
forecasting whether it's having functions that run on schedules or because of a reaction that happens inside of your data store an event that's created all these different things where actually the bread and butter of everything are these events but they've never been in a place where they're all together you can get cross like dimensional kind of context between the different streams and then be able to do new and interesting things on top of that and so that's what's the most exciting thing because we're finally on that
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
journey of bringing together ideas from the past ideas from the world we live in now putting them on top of axiom and then putting them out to customers as quickly as possible
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
As the team, that kind of efficiency, even as we build the org, as we use the things that we've made, dog food it, show how we're using it as a startup, as a company that's trying to balance these new technologies with this kind of full history of everything we've done, what can we learn from the past, et cetera.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
I'm really excited about just giving that out to the world, but also showing the ways that we use it as well.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
I think it's changed over the years. Probably the most consistent, weirdly enough, has been Nat Friedman, who started Xamarin. But before then, he was also part of the GNOME project on the Linux side and things like that. I think I learned a lot from Mark Shuttleworth at Canonical.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
He started Ubuntu, which of course is like immense, the impact it's had, both if you love it and if you hate it, essentially, but it definitely an impact one way or the other. And I think that's given me an entire life, which I didn't really know that I would have, which is incredible. But I think right now, probably the person that I think about in terms of what
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
do they do what would they do etc is probably not just because having worked with them at zamarin i got to see a lot of that close up and things i didn't actually understand then now being further into building axiom they make more sense to me and i realize like those that way of thinking the vision putting it together waiting for certain times to start doing certain things etc
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
I just feel like I lean on that a lot. And the other thing which I wish I could mimic from him, which I'm so bad at, is the communication style. I'm too wordy and he just has this very clean communication style, which I have to somehow get to at some point.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
Talk about it. Write about it. I think writing is important. I think because you have to build that kind of marketing muscle really earlier than I thought you did. You can keep building things, but it's not as useful if no one's going to actually know they exist.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
If you can convert your passion into words or you can convert your passion into being part of a podcast or whatever it is, if you're passionate about it, there'll be others out there that will also be passionate about it, but they need to know you exist. I think after everything, I'd say that because I think that would also solve the, hey, do you get advice earlier or do you get feedback earlier?
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
Everything comes from the fact that can you just go out there and get people interested in what you're doing?
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
Axiom is a event store essentially and when you have logs or trace events if you have events being generated from products or your services things like that and what it does is it takes it all in gets it stored for you and makes it immediately queryable however you want and so you may be making charts and analytics you may be just looking at that data raw or you may want to do something with that and you know export it somewhere else and
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
So essentially what we've been doing is building out the data store, which is brand new and it's something we built ourselves. And the whole idea is that so much of an organization's data is actually held in events. And those are the things that are happening with a timestamp.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And they actually bring up the history of what you do, whether it's a service doing it, whether it's a person doing it, etc. And so what Axiom does is allow you to store all of that for a really long time and then bring value out of that, whether it's for log analysis, tracing, whether it's for product analytics or anything related like that.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
We actually started off with less on the data store side and more on the side of trying to build out more of like event tooling. So the connectivity piece around how do you make sense of all this data that's caught up in silos. So at the time, the data stores would allow you to have about 15 days, 30 days of data before it started getting really expensive, etc.,
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And we were thinking and working on if companies want to do something with this, how do they build out event systems on top or have reactive states on top and things like that.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And actually, after diving into that for a while, what we realized was no matter what we did on the top of an event store, if you can't actually store all of your events, you couldn't get to the value of that we thought we would provide on top. Axiom essentially evolved from trying to do the product side of it down to first trying to solve the data store side.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
We created the first MVP of this kind of system that you could run a shell script. It would install into your AWS and then bang, you had this kind of interface. You could query logs and metrics. You could do things with it in terms of attach their state to something else happening. And it was all very shaky.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And one of the problems we kept having was in trying to get the MVP out, we had to have a hard dependency on some kind of data store being available. So if we're encouraging people to send us data so we could make sense of it, you need to put it somewhere.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And so initially, when we were trying to give it out to people, they were like, but I want to use this, but I don't have Elastic available right now, or I have to wait to get access to our companies or whatever. My co-founder, he was like, oh, no, I can just build something internally where we won't need to ask for anything just for them to try it out.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And so he made this thing called EventDB, which was just like this demo store inside of our product. And it was just meant to be like this easy onboarding for people who we just wanted feedback of, to be honest. The feedback was like, hey, this is really cool. The problem is, though, what you're trying to do, we just don't have enough data for it.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
We want to do it, but we don't have enough data for what you're trying to achieve. And when we do all the costings and stuff, it's not going to work out for us to have enough to make the second part viable. And then you talk to them a little bit more and they say, but what are you using for your data store? How come I didn't have to connect you to anything?
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
Why am I sending everything and being able to read it back so easily? And then the penny dropped and we quickly realized that's the thing we should be working on first and make that viable. So that was the first MVP. It caused the pivot to happen within weeks, essentially, of us giving it to people to try out.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And then the second one was about actually 18 months after that when we released our beta cloud around our data store. So we took this demo data store and we made it real during that time. And so that was the second MAP.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
It was interesting because you have already built a bunch of things up from the front end to API services back down to how those API services talk to a data store. So the new part was the data store. The old parts were the API server and the front end, which we were repurposing. The reality was the data store we were building was very novel in architecture.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And at the time, we felt like as long as we did these three things, we would have it done within a certain number of months, basically. And we were trying to go for the ingest will be brand new and we'll do it like this. Storage will only use object storage. Queries will only use serverless.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And exactly how you'd expect engineers to behave, we were like, and we'll get it done within six months, right? Or eight months or whatever it was. The reality, though, was that for the API and the front-end side, we just ate the tech debt and we just repurposed it to make it work in that timeframe. What happened was essentially we had made a data store.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And so there's endless things on the other side of you making that viable, as well as we needed our AWS. There were problems like the bandwidth between S3 and Lambda. We were getting caught on that constantly. So we were hitting the limits there. So you could get all the data in, get it into S3, but we couldn't query it fast enough because we just basically saturate everything.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And if we kept ending lambdas, obviously that has an issue around cost. And so we had all these issues. And so just even we ate the debt on one side. And then on the other side, if you went back, you'd be like, we didn't need to. We had the time to redo it from scratch, essentially, just because the data store was going to take longer than we thought.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
The data store we were building was very novel in architecture. And at the time, we felt like as long as we did these three things, we would have it done within a certain number of months, basically. And we were trying to go for the ingest will be brand new and we'll do it like this. Storage will only use object storage. Queries will only use serverless.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
The feeling we had when we released the beta cloud, our MVP, was we had felt we had now been much later than we had thought about bringing the thing we were building to market. It doesn't matter which thing we were building, but since the inception of the company to bringing it to market, it had elongated because we decided to pivot. And we were just desperate.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
Like we had this massive list of things we could have done, but we were so desperate to just put it into people's hands. In a way, we pushed off anything that would have made like complete sense for us to be like, okay, of course you build this next or that next or whatever.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
And instead we worked on just talking to as many people as possible, getting as many people to use it, getting that feedback and just working through feedback. And honestly, I'd say we probably did that for a couple of quarters where we didn't really work as much towards these are like the longer term goals. We worked more towards this thing is so new in so many places.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
The last thing we wanted to do was continue to run without actually getting a feeling of what's happening around us. We put ourselves in the hands of our first users and then the growing user base, and we've focused on just making them happy. What happened from that was essentially we grew our user base, which is great.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
We learned where they were, where we needed to be to get more people to use us, to get the right feedback and things, and also different kind of levels of usage between startups, between late stage startups, actual businesses, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. As we grew into those, we could pick up things like off the shell of the back burner, which we knew we would want to do.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
But we could blend them into what the customers wanted as well. And so even now we have this vision of when I like I carry this vision all the time of, OK, I know exactly what I want Axiom to be. But we're always trying to align it with the current needs of customers or like the three month or six month needs of customers. And then we don't try and make roadmaps as much.
Code Story
S9 E27: Neil Patel, Axiom
We're just more in terms of here's what the quarter looks like. Here's what we absolutely know what we'll do in the next quarter. Otherwise, we won't overly define things right now.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
A lot of people say like, oh, you need to go to Harvard to do well or you need to grow up with money. Well, I think it's just as powerful to not have those things.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
We're small considered to like a Microsoft, but based on the classification of the US government, we're considered a large business. Although I still look at it as small compared to like a Microsoft. You're going to run into silly little lawsuits. And a lot of them aren't necessarily lawsuits. They're just legal issues. I've had people, they show up to the office one day.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
We're mainly remote now these days. And after one day, they have some health scares, so they're not in the business, but we're still paying them. They have their time off based on their condition. And then three months later, when they have to start coming back and working, they'll be like, I had sexual harassment. I'm going to see him. What?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
oh, you're only in the office for one day for like six hours. What was the harassment? Oh, people were really mean to me on Slack. And I'm like, we keep all the logs. I'm like, where is it? We have in-house counsel. And of course we pay law firms. But like, sometimes it's just cheaper to be like, here's a thousand dollars. Goodbye.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Then it is to like fight things because fighting it, whether you have in-house resources or external, it still costs money. Everything costs money. So it's an equation and you're dealing with a balance. It's nonstop. The horror stories that must come out of a Microsoft or Apple. When you have 300,000 employees, I don't know what companies go through.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
It must be crazy and not necessarily painful because a lot of the people at the top are not dealing with it. But even this example... I didn't know about it until six months later. And they were just like, yeah, the person could improve anything. They said they had screenshots. When we asked them for the screenshots, they came up with nothing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
A lot of people believe that you need to start from a certain area to do well, like going to a good college or having parents who have money. And don't get me wrong, going to Stanford or Harvard does help because it opens up networking. even potential money.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And when we went back, because you can see history in Slack and stuff, they're like, we found nothing. We showed them all their conversations. They couldn't point out anything. They still said they were going to sue. They had a contingency-based lawyer. And they're just like, look, it was cheaper to give a $1,000 check than it is to deal with anything.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And yes, sometimes it's principled, but do you want to spend 10 grand fighting anything or do you rather just pay the thousand bucks and move on?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Kissmetrics was a spin out of Crazy Egg. And Crazy Egg is a much older company. I don't know how old it is now, maybe 16-ish years, I'm guessing, maybe more. What I ended up learning over the years is if you do something long enough in a decent enough market, like a big enough market, you can grow. Just most people don't pick a big enough TAM.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Crazy Egg has an okay TAM, but it's not the biggest TAM. And people don't do it long enough. And when I say, okay, TAM, I'm not saying Crazy Egg is really tiny, but it's not a big TAM like CRM or operating systems or mobile phones or electric cars. Those are like really, really massive TAMs. Even my ad agency, NP Digital, it's in a big TAM, but it's not as big of a TAM as housing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
You know what I mean? Everyone needs a house or electricity. Natural resources is a much bigger market. And what I found is if you just do something long enough and decent enough, you can actually create a big enough business. You look at most large corporations, they don't do everything perfectly. Microsoft for the longest time had the blue screen of death with their Windows operating system.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
The younger generation doesn't realize it, but us older generation, you're young, but I'm old. And we realize the blue screen of death because that was just ingrained in our head. Salesforce, great product, but you got to pay consultants to help you use it and developers to help make it work right. And it's not the most usable product, but it's just a big enough market.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And you end up learning that not everything has to be perfect. You look at Tesla, their company's worth an arm and a leg. Go sit in a Tesla car. We have one, so I'm not trying to knock everything about Tesla. I think Elon's done an amazing job with technology. But go sit in that car driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The seats are extremely uncomfortable.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
I have a friend who created a hedge fund right out of graduating from Harvard Law School because his buddies went to Harvard as well and a lot of them had rich parents and were in finance. And his fund did extremely well. This was before the dot-com boom. He cashed out right before the dot-com crash and he retired.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
If you sit in a Mercedes seat, it's five, 10 times more comfortable and your back is less likely to hurt on the journey. Well, in a Tesla, it's almost guaranteed to hurt. For most people, it's going to hurt in that six-hour journey. But in a Mercedes, you're usually good. And it doesn't mean you have to do everything perfectly to build a big company. Does it mean Tesla's bad? No.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Does it mean Mercedes bad? No. There's different products for different people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
What's the longest journey you've done in a Tesla?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Funny enough, when I first started out, I had no intentions of building a personal brand. I just created content. And I did that because I didn't have the money to spend on advertising. So it was my way of marketing without having the big budgets of the larger corporations.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And over the years, my personal brand started building because I was speaking at events, creating content online, then leveraging social media. Social media wasn't as popular when I started. And it just all started adding up, sending out email newsletters, doing in-person networking events, and the list went on and on.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
What I found over the years is you can build a company through a personal brand. It helps. But it's hard to build a really large corporation from a personal brand. The biggest companies are not personal brands. You look at Kylie Cosmetics. I'm not trying to knock her. Kylie Jenner did an amazing job, but it's nowhere near the size of L'Oreal or Estee Lauder.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Again, she did an amazing job with a personal brand, way better than I did. Not trying to knock her. I'm just trying to compare the size of a personal brand versus a corporate brand. I think Nike's done it the best. We're going to leverage Jordan. We're going to leverage Kobe Bryant, you know, who sadly passed away a while ago.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
We're going to leverage LeBron James and all these athletes to help them promote our corporate brand. And that's an extremely well for them. Heck, even Salesforce, you know, I watch CNBC every once in a while when AI started really coming out. You would see Salesforce commercials with Matthew McConaughey talking about Salesforce and AI. And these corporations leverage personal brands all the time.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And if having rich parents also helps because you can end up getting cash to start a business or maybe they open up their network. But you don't have to have any of that to do well. A lot of the entrepreneurs out there have started from very little and have done well. A great example of this, Steve Jobs, didn't come from much.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
But the key is if you want to build something big, build a corporate brand. It just makes more than personal brands. But there's no reason why you can't have both. And I think the best combination is both versus one. And if you don't have the time and energy to build a personal brand, leverage a lot of them to promote your corporate brand. And that works as well.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Honestly, at this point, we don't really build anything. We just buy. The team does continuously add features and maintain the companies and try to grow them. But we spend more of our money on M&A and just buying up competitors than anything else because it just tends to be more efficient. and a better use of money than trying to create things from scratch.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
I honestly believe entrepreneurship is one of the hardest things to do. Going from zero to 10 million is really hard. It's much easier to go from 10 to 100 in a big organization or 100 to a billion. And I think starting it up and getting to the first 10, most people don't hit those milestones. So what we just like doing is we just like finding the companies that have built something we want
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
buy it, and then we approve upon it and scale it. And that's the model we've been leveraging for quite a few years, and we like it. There's no right or wrong playbook. People like Apple like building things from scratch, creating even new markets or reinventing existing markets. I believe entrepreneurs and owners and leaders need to play on their strengths. I'm really good with finance.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
I'm really good with marketing. It's easier and more efficient for my co-founder and I, who's really good at sales and recruiting, to just go buy something that is great, but they haven't got enough traction and just give it the traction it needs with sales and marketing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Yeah, we bought many companies over the years, but like Ubersuggest never created it. Bought it for $120,000. I think we put maybe $3 million into the product. I'm taking a rough guess. And we made our money back fairly quickly. It makes more than that in profit a year of whatever we spent. Another one that we did was we bought a tool called Answer the Public for 8.6.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
They said it was doing around $120,000 a month in profit. It wasn't because it said $120,000 in profit, our only expense is servers. Well, what about employees for support? What about people to refund unhappy customers? Like, oh, we don't have any of that. You don't really need to do that. I'm like, yes, you do. So the true profit was probably call it six, 700 grand a year.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Elon Musk, don't get me wrong, smart kid, but it's not like he grew up with a dad who has hundreds of millions of dollars or anything like that. A lot of it was self-earned. And you have countless examples of this Mark Andreessen, right? The creator of the internet or Netscape, not really the internet, but he was early on when it came to browsing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
So we probably paid closer to 12-ish times, 12, 13-ish times profit on the business. But when we took it over, we were able to provide really quick growth. And within six months of spending time on it, we bought it and we let it sit there because we didn't have time for our integration team and some of our development team.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
But just in the first six months, we've owned it for quite a bit longer now and we've seen good growth even after. But in the first six months, we were able to take it from, call it, 60 a month in profit to 200 plus grand a month in profit, literally in just a six month time. And then we're able to see more growth after that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
But a lot of times there's just little things that you need to adjust and tweak to get more growth. And one of the biggest problems with Answer the Public was they had a $99 plan and we already knew the market for their product with the features they had, people would love it at $9 a month. So we created a $9 plan and that changed the business. Literally that one change.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And instead of saying you got to pay up front, we did a free trial because we knew free trials in this space convert better and just do seven days. And we knew if they took more payment options like PayPal, they would see another 16 to 18% lift for new revenue on a monthly basis. So there's just a lot of small things that they were doing wrong that we knew were easy fixes.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And when I said the first six months, it was really only like two and a half months of change, but it took six months to really see all the results from those changes. And then After that, we were able to see a lot more progress, but it required much more work to see the future growth. But we knew going into the business, okay, we can get it to a real 200 a month in profit really, really fast.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And if you're buying something for... 8.6 and you're doing 2.4, you're paying less than four times profit. It's not hard to arbitrage. And we knew there was a path to getting to three, four, five, 600 grand a month in profit and the steps we needed to take to get the product there. So it was a really easy math equation for us.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
I just done it long enough. I've done marketing for so many businesses and so many different verticals. You kind of figure out what works. I'm not saying because I'm smart or anything like that. I'm not saying because I'm a better marketer. And none of those are true. The only reason I'm saying it works is I just have done it for so many years in so many industries, not being smart.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
You know, Elon Musk is considered smart in my book or Bill Gates, me on the other end of not knowing much and having a low IQ. You just learn what works and what doesn't by just doing something long enough and making enough mistakes.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
AOL, I believe, was the one who bought his company back in the day. It's not like he went to Harvard or Stanford and grew up with really wealthy parents. Now, for all of those examples, I have countless examples of people who have also done well, who went to Harvard or Stanford. And funny enough, Elon did go to Stanford. But I also have examples on both sides. And it doesn't make or break you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
My first job was cleaning restrooms and picking up trash because that was the circumstances I was dealt.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Jack Ma said it best. He would recommend someone who's young to go work for someone else. learn from all the mistakes, build the network, learn on their dime. And then once you have the experience, maybe seven, eight, 10 years later, go start your own business. And a lot of times just going and doing something on your own right away isn't necessarily the best choice.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Reason being is there's a lot that we can learn over the years. There's a lot of things that other people have done right that can help us in our future. There's a lot of networking opportunities that you can use in your future from the relationships you build from working for others.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And if you have this end goal, the quickest path to getting that end goal isn't necessarily to go from where you are to just try to do that. Sometimes you need to go in between and take a few extra steps to really accomplish what you're looking to do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
You hit the nail on the head, right? In which you have to be intentional with your decisions. You're going to have opportunities that arise in between, but if that opportunity can make you more money in the short run, but it's going to derail you from your goal, a lot of times you're going to have to learn to say no, and it can be painful, but you got to think very long term.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
You work hard for a long time and you continue networking, put yourself in a lot of different rooms and places, and you'll get lucky. People think luck happens from just people randomly, but what they don't realize is they're trying and they've been so many different places that good things just happen because of hard work.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And what ends up happening is a lot of people are just stuck in their ways and feeling like they're unlucky so they don't do much. Well, if you don't do much, you're not giving yourself the opportunity to get lucky.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
But if you keep going to meetings and you keep speaking at events and you keep creating content and marketing your business and you keep trying to sell, eventually you'll get lucky and things will start going your way, assuming you're learning from your mistakes and continually improving.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
I think one of the things that's built me is not growing up with a ton. My parents provided as much as they can, amazing parents. But when you want more and your parents can't provide it, it gives you a drive. And that's when people say like, oh, you need to go to Harvard to do well or you need to grow up with money.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Well, I think it's just as powerful to not have those things because it really gives you that drive that some of those other people may have or they may not have. And usually in many cases from MC, they usually don't have that drive compared to that person who has come from very little and they want it really badly.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
My mom was a teacher. My dad worked for a bank, not as executive as a bank. He worked as a loan processor and started at the bottom and never really got anywhere to the top, never even to middle management. And I did okay. You know, I'm living in Los Angeles, California in a nice affluent neighborhood.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Now, I have seen people who are super successful and went to Harvard, EX Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates who have that drive as well. So it doesn't mean that having a great degree or having well-off parents means you won't have a drive. It's just usually you see a lot of hunger from people who don't have it yet.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
The latest big decision that I made, it was a few years ago, but it took me a long time in my career to be okay with this. I just started growing in headcount, you know, get to a hundred people, get to a thousand plus people. You can't always do everything your way. It's not about micromanaging, but sometimes entrepreneurs have this notion that their way is the right way.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
If people have KPIs and goals and they're hitting it for the business, it's okay if they do it in their way. Like if it's not going to harm the business in the long run, There's many ways to skin a cat and your way in your eyes may be the best way and someone else's eyes, their way may be way better than yours.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And if they both hit the goal and similar manners and similar efficiencies and cost structures, it's okay if someone chooses a different route. As long as they hit the goal, they hit the goal. They're not breaking laws and they're being ethical. not hurting the company in the long run, you're okay with that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And that's helped a lot because you're empowering people to do it their way versus not necessarily micromanaging, but feeling that things should be in a certain way and trying to persuade people to do it your way, wastes a lot of hours.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
not just the independence to think the way they want, but to more so hold people to the fire on the KPI, their feet to the fire, and not try to tell people how to do it. If they need help or they need guidance by all means, but don't try to critique someone's way if it's possible for them to hit the goals in a different way or manner than you would choose.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And my first job was cleaning restrooms and picking up trash because that was the circumstances I was dealt.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
The best piece of business advice I ever got was from a guy named Phil Black. He was one of my investors at Kissmetrics. And it took me six plus years to realize this after he told me the advice. And he says, Neil, as a founder or co-founder, as an entrepreneur,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Your only real job that you got to do is hire the right people who have been successful at accomplishing that one thing that you're trying to solve. And if you're trying to solve 10 things, you go find the 10 people that you know can solve it and have a proven track record. And you let them go do their thing. So it took me six plus years to really understand this.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And in my ad agency, NP Digital, when we got it started, we hired people who have done it before successfully. So for example, our CEO, Mike Gullickson, was a president of our competitor called iProspect. And globally, I think, I don't know how many people they have now. My guess is 15 plus thousand people, but maybe at the time around seven-ish thousand people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
So he's ran an agency successfully, and not just once. Before that, he was the CEO of Cabario, did well, sold that. He was head of sales and then CEO of iCrossing, which sold to Hearst. So he's done it three times in our space for companies that aren't identical, but do exactly what we do, and they're close enough to identical. So having him do it the fourth time reduces risk.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Having someone who headed up sales for Europe, for iProspect, which is one of our competitors, head up sales for us in Europe is usually low risk. Oh, what'd you do before this? I head up sales for this other competitor and I did great there.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And when they work for your competition or multiple competitors and they continually got promoted within those organizations, it means that the organization found them valuable. When you interview someone, everyone says they're the reason that things happen great and the business boom. but you don't really know.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
But if someone keeps getting promoted within an organization, it usually means the company found them valuable. So if someone stayed at a company for a while, kept getting promoted, and they worked at a few of your competitors and they got promoted at both of them, the chances are when they come to you, they're going to do well, assuming they're a cultural fit.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
You work your way up to them. So there's a person who worked for your competitors who was great at growing them from zero to a million or two million in revenue or even five million. There was another person who's great at growing them from five to 10 and another person from 10 to 100, another person from 100 to a billion.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Go find the people in different roles that helped them throughout different stages and get them for that stage that you're in. The people at the earlier stages are much more affordable. Sometimes they're going to be expensive, but you can compensate them through equity or you can raise money. There's many ways to convince people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
We provide anything when it comes to digital marketing and we teach people how to just get more traffic and grow faster. Our ad agency, NP Digital, just does it for companies on a global scale. But if you want free advice, you know, neilpatel.com. All my social handles are Neil Patel and teach marketing every single day. Or if you just want us to do it for you, check out NP Digital.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
When I was around 15, I shouldn't have been doing this, but I was selling music to kids, music CDs. I was helping people with televisions. I was helping people with cable boxes. I was selling stereo equipment that are car parts. I was selling whatever I could to make money. And I had a reseller's permit. from the State Board of Equalization in Southern California.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
I honestly believe entrepreneurship is one of the hardest things to do. I've done marketing for so many businesses and so many different verticals. You kind of figure out what works. I'm not saying because I'm smart or anything like that. I'm not saying because I'm a better marketer. You just learn what works and what doesn't by just doing something long enough and making enough mistakes.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
I would buy things from stores for a cheaper price because a business buying as a business, a lot of times they'll give you discounts. And then I would sell it to people for a more expensive price. And it worked out really well. And I made some money from that combined with working nine to five jobs, although they weren't really nine to five. They're more so like four to seven p.m.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
jobs, like working after school and weekends. Combination of both of them gave me enough capital to really get a kickstart into whatever I really wanted to do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Yeah, so when I started my first website, I was looking for actually a job. My sister at this time, I was young in high school, 16. She worked for Oracle Financial Consultant. So to give you an idea, imagine a grocery store. This was quite a while ago. This was more than 20 years ago, 23, 24 years ago, somewhere around there.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And he would end up telling them what to place where to maximize the revenue. And at that time, he was getting paid a few hundred bucks an hour. Imagine getting paid 250 bucks an hour. In today's world, that's a lot of money. But 23, 24 years ago, that was definitely a lot of money. So I was like, huh, I want to be this Oracle financial consultant.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
I started going online and I started searching for these jobs on sites like monster.com. Keep in mind, back then, I don't even know if LinkedIn existed. But when I was searching, there were requirements. There were no kids who were just graduating high school and making tons of money. Most of them had college degrees, which were prerequisite for most jobs.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And to be an Oracle financial consultant, you need all these Oracle certifications. Keep in mind, I didn't even know what Oracle was other than there was this rich guy named Larry Ellison. So once I realized I didn't qualify for any of the jobs, browsing these jobs, I realized they were making millions of dollars. I'm like, you know what?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
I can create a job site like monster.com or career builder or hot jobs. And if I make 1% of what they make, I'm going to be a millionaire, right? Because if they're making hundreds of millions a year, take 1%, that's rich. Little kid doesn't understand the concept of there's revenue and profit. I just look at it as I'm collecting money if I can make 1%.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And I paid someone to help me create a website and I launched it, got little to no traffic. And I learned you need to do something called marketing. And that's how I got into it. And I realized you can build whatever you want, but if you can't market, you can't convince people to come to your site, you're not going to make any money.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
You can be in the biggest industry ever, and if you suck at whatever you're doing and you don't enjoy it, it's going to be hard to make money.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Yeah, so then I found a marketing agency, one in Canada, one in California, paid both of them, didn't get any results, lost my money, and I didn't have a ton of money. Maybe I wasn't paying the right marketing agencies. Got little to no results, had no choice but to learn it on my own. Got decent at it. My site started getting really good traffic within six months.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
I still wasn't making any money, but I was like, huh, I can do this marketing part. I'm terrible at this revenue generation part. And at that time, I really wasn't thinking about entrepreneurship. I was like, you know what? I was a little bit of a book nerd. I'm like, I'm just going to go to college, get a degree and go get a job at Microsoft or something.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
But I started college early with nighttime classes while I was in high school. So I did a class on speech 101 when I was around 16 at a local community college. And my first speech was on how Google's algorithm works. And someone in that class worked for a power supply manufacturer. None of us would really think power supplies, big industry, but there's power supplies in everything.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
I think one of the things that's built me is...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Heart resuscitators, Boeing airplanes. And the company I was working with provided the power supplies to a lot of these corporations. And through digital marketing or SEO, I was able to drive them around $20 to $25 million worth of additional revenue. And it wasn't all me because you had the sales team who had to close the revenue, product had to fulfill.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
But they were just paying me $5,000 a month. We were barely spending money on ads. It was mainly SEO. And they were just like, we're really happy with you. The owner of the company, his son owned an ad agency called Tonic LA at that time. I don't think they exist anymore. And he introduced me to Blue Cross Blue Shield, Countrywide, and ING Direct.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And what he was doing is closing the clients on his end and just being like, hey, my dad pays you five grand a month, so we'll just give you five grand per month for a client, right? And I was like, sure. So being 16, making 20 grand, not having tons of overhead, I was happy. And that's how I really got started.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
My parents told me if I don't get a college degree, no good Indian girl is ever going to marry me. So I went to college because they wanted me to. I didn't want to myself. And my parents weren't making much. And I'm not saying I was making a lot of money or anything either. I'm not saying I'm well off. But at that time, I was making more money than they were on a monthly basis combined.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
So I didn't want to go to college. I went to the local college called Cal State Fullerton because I just didn't care to do anything. I didn't even take my SAT 2s, which were required for a lot of colleges. And I was like, I don't care. I don't want to go to school. So I was making it hard to get into any college that was somewhat decent. Got into Cal State Fullerton. Of course, it wasn't hard.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
I had good grades until I started making money. Good SAT scores. And what ended up happening was I didn't want to finish graduating. My sister did a lot of my online classes because my parents wanted me to get a degree. And going into school, I took enough AP and IB classes where I should have been able to graduate in two and a half years. But it took me five and a half years, if I'm not mistaken.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And my sister did quite a bit of my classes. I know I shouldn't be saying that, but it's just the reality. Fast forward to the future, didn't get married to an Indian girl. The college degree didn't help with marriage because over time people didn't care. And my parents eventually were like, we don't care who you get married to, just get married.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And eventually I did get married and had kids and my parents were happy.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Doing something long enough really helps. I'm not saying college is bad or good, but sometimes doing certain things helps kick people in the butt. You mentioned you were in the Air Force. I don't know if that was here or overseas. Being in the Air Force, gives you regimen. You're going to have to wake up. You're going to have to do certain things at certain times. You have no choice.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
It makes people understand how hard life can be and how you have to do things, whether you like them or not. So I think that's really good for people. But spending 10,000 hours on something, I think, is a little excessive, especially at the beginning, because most people don't know what they want to do in life. And what I recommend to people is just go try a lot of things.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Spend an hour, spend five hours. What you'll find is a lot of the stuff you suck at, you won't like. A lot of the stuff you're naturally decent at or good at, you'll like and you'll be willing to spend more time on. And you'll naturally spend a thousand hours and get better and 5,000 and 10,000 over many, many years.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
But you'll spend the time and energy you needed because you want to because you're enjoying it and you'll get really good at it and it makes it easier to monetize. But you can be in the biggest industry ever and if you suck, at whatever you're doing and you don't enjoy it, it's going to be hard to make money. You really want to try a lot of things.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
You use process of elimination and double down on the stuff that you're naturally good at and you love. And they tend to go hand in hand on what you love and what you're naturally good at.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Started one too many companies when I was younger, had ADD and most of them did not work out. The venture funded one Kissmetrics didn't work out. We had bad luck with class action lawsuits and FTC investigation. We passed the FTC investigation with flying colors. The class action lawsuit, I learned a little dirty secret about the US and how US laws work.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
Sometimes it's cheaper to settle because the insurance company pays it versus fighting it in court and winning. But you're out so much in legal fees that you've lost more than if you just settled and leveraged insurance dollars. So for me, the KISS metrics would have been sold. We had a few people circling to buy the company if it wasn't for those two things.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
But eventually the company didn't work out because it really derailed the trajectory and the growth with the lawsuit and the FTC investigation.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
We were really lucky in which we had good investors for that business. There was a gentleman named Phil Black who was on our board and he was with the venture fund. He still is, I believe, with True Ventures. And they've done some really cool companies like Peloton. Their stock boomed early in the day. They were early investors.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
They probably made a killing or Blue Bottle Coffee, Automatic, which is WordPress. And When you have investors who have just been through so many of these things before, they're just like, oh, don't worry, you should talk to this lawyer as part of this law firm. One of their partners was the ex-deputy director of the FTC. They'll help guide us through it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
And they just make things much more easier to deal with. So it's a lot less stressful. It's much more stressful in the heat of it. But looking back on it, it's not bad at all. I remember I probably smoked a cigarette for the first time when I was going through that just to try it out. I'm like, give me that. Let's see how that tastes. And I'm not saying cigarettes people should or shouldn't smoke.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire
It was just more so that was my first experience. Yeah, you just get used to over time of dealing with the stress and the ups and downs. Funny enough, at our ad agency, NP Digital, I don't remember when we weren't in a lawsuit. And like, it's over little things, right? Like once you have a scale, we're in, I think, 19 or 20 countries. We have a good amount of employees.
The Money Mondays
What Does It Take to Become a Real Estate Investor in 2025? w/ Albert Preciado 🏘️ EP106
models, influencer people, business people, dudes, chicks, pretty much everyone to hold up a sign. And it caused a ton of people to Google for my name, which then helped with a lot of my Google rankings.
The Money Mondays
What Does It Take to Become a Real Estate Investor in 2025? w/ Albert Preciado 🏘️ EP106
All right, bye.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
When I used to invest in companies, I would look at things like, first off, is it a big TAM? TAM stands for Total Addressable Market. It doesn't matter how good you are at execution, if you go after a really tiny market, if you capture 100% of it, you're only going to make so much money. So you want to go after big markets where people are spending hundreds of billions a year.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
See, that's a good feeling.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
And why do you do that every year?
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
Yeah, so we are in, I think, 20-ish countries, 19 or 20, something like that, or 21. We have people all around the world. And let's say if you're a company like L'Oreal, which we work with, or Adobe, or pick a name, you know, where they say we need to do marketing to sell more cosmetic products or software or enterprise security, whatever it may be.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
But see, that's the point. A lot of people do charity because of some personal feeling and it's great. And I think a lot of people pick a charity from their heart. My wife picks them from the heart. I pick them more logically. Right. Execution of it. Looking at dollars wise. And I'm not saying her way is better or my way is better. You need both because charity does need to involve the heart.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
Sure. And it needs some logic as well because you need to make sure that you're not getting ripped off. Mm-hmm.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
At this point, the leaders in the country and the recruiting staff is in charge for it. But when we started off, what we did was we would go on LinkedIn, look for all the people that worked for multiple competitors, got promoted many times. Because everyone says when you interview them, oh, I'm amazing. Look what I did. You don't really know if they did that.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
But if they worked at a company, ideally a competitor, they got promoted multiple times, it means a company usually found them valuable. Now, if they did it at two of your competitors and got promoted multiple times, it's usually not dumb luck. It's usually they're good at what they are doing or claiming. So hiring those people and paying them more is a great way to get great talent.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
And we would message them on LinkedIn like, hey, Mike, love what you did in your career. I'm actually looking for someone like you for my company. If you know of anyone, let me know. It's indirect. It's not as forceful when you're reaching out to them. It's casual. And most of the time, they go, hey, I'm actually interested. And we found that to be very successful.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
And then when you get good people, they don't like working with shitty people. So then they just keep bringing more and more good people.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
So I was actually asked this question earlier today, a little bit different. And I want my kids to do whatever makes them happy. I do business and it genuinely makes me happy. I did an irrevocable trust ages ago and I probably shouldn't have given them as much, but I didn't know as much back then. And I didn't know the shares would have been worth as much as well. And they don't know about it.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
So when they get older, we'll see. But the way I look at it is if my kids do whatever makes them happy, I'm happy. And if they want to live in New York, cool, figure out life on your own. If they want to live in Beverly Hills next door to me, I will buy them the home and I'll make sure they have food and basic necessities covered. But if they want to live on their own, they got to figure it out.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
Now, granted, they have an irrevocable trust, but they're young kids. They're three and five, so they don't know. And yeah, I would just want to make sure that their basic necessities are covered. We have a committee that looks over the trust and the kids will always have their basic necessities covered, even if they want to be in New York. Like, I don't ever want them on the street.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
But if they're just like, I want to buy a car and I want a Toyota Camry. No problem. I want a Ferrari or Mercedes. Figure it out on your own. Oh, I want to go to Italy. Figure it out on your own. So I'm happy to provide basic necessities so they can focus on what they love. I'm not okay providing more than basic necessities.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
And I think the basic necessity that I'm talking about is even more than what most people would consider. Like, you want to buy food? No problem. I'll pay for organic food. You want to buy alcohol from Whole Foods? Figure it out on your own. Right? But I just want to make sure they're okay and healthy. Something's happening to planet Earth and you need a crap load of money to live on Mars?
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
No problem. I'll give you the money.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
right so situations like that no worries you have a health scare medical bills won't be covered by insurance I'll gladly pay for it but I don't want to give them the luxuries that they don't need that they should earn just like everyone else so you create more content than pretty much any other person in the business world where can people find you on social media why do you care so much about the content
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
We market to companies and people within all the countries that they're targeting.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
Neil Patel is my social handles, and I care because if you just give a lot of information away, it helps others. I didn't know this when I originally started doing it, but it comes back in full, and you gain customers and revenue from it, brand recognition. The brand recognition may be important to you. I mainly care about the revenue, and also I create a lot of content because it's just fun.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
You meet cool people doing things like this. I was walking into Ty's house earlier. Some lady got me, and she's like, oh, I'm a CO, come on in. And I was watching Sugar Ray Leonard, and he kind of hit someone in the rib cage, softly, but it hurt them. It was entertaining for me. I was like, oh, this is cool. They should have never stood up.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
I would have never let a 68-year-old professional boxer hit me anyway.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
Yeah, he's in better shape than I am.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
They typically have people in-house and then they hire companies that specialize in certain things that they can help their internal team just get faster results and better results.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
You can hire one at any stage. I don't necessarily know if everyone needs one, but like for example, if you're at a million, $2 million, there could be a contractor that you know that will charge you $2,500 a month and can do really well and just drive a ton of Facebook ads and drive you more revenue. And that's great.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
If someone captures 1% of it, you're generating a billion in revenue a year. That's a lot of money.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
If you hire someone full-time internally, it may cost you a hundred grand a year. Why not pay the person 2,500 bucks a month, which ends up being $30,000 a year, which is way cheaper than hiring that full-time person for a hundred grand a year.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
do whatever you're passionate about. If you already know you love something like cooking or making necklaces or hats, go do that. If you're like, one day I want to start a business in this space, instead of just going off and starting a business, I highly recommend working for someone for a little bit. Ideally a fast growing growth stage startup, not an early startup, but a growth stage one.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
So you can learn from a lot of their mistakes and also build up your Rolodex and gain connections from working there for a little bit. And then go venture off on your own because you'll avoid making a lot of the common mistakes.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
If you have a few hundred grand, I would recommend investing in yourself. You're gonna be the best investment, hands down, whether it's leveling up your skillset, your knowledge, your Rolodex, your connections, whatever it may be, invest in yourself.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
If you wanna park money somewhere else, stock market, startups, or whatever it may be, I would actually start off with the companies that you use on a daily basis that you're super passionate about. So for example, if you know all you and your friends are addicted to buying on Amazon instead of going to Walmart, then just buy a little bit of Amazon stock. For sure. It's a really simple model.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
But if you're the only friend that's really into something, let's say like this energy drink, and you're the only one really consuming it and no one else is, you may want to be careful putting your money in that. But if it's an established company that you know everyone uses and loves and they're continually growing, park some of your money there. Not a lot.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
If you have 100 grand, you can park 3%, 4%, 5% max into something.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
I think it's Monster Energy?
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
I haven't invested in a company in ages. I stopped because it was too much work and I don't have the time. But what I started doing was just investing in funds and then let them pick and choose. I started dealing with all the K1s for tax time. When I used to invest in companies, I would look at things like, first off, is it a big TAM? TAM stands for Total Addressable Market.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
It doesn't matter how good you are at execution. If you go after a really tiny market, if you capture a hundred percent of it, you're only going to make so much money. So you want to go after big markets where people are spending hundreds of billions a year. If someone captures 1% of it, you're generating a billion in revenue a year. That's a lot of money.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
You got a business that can sell for a crap ton of cash for that. So first is a big TAM, second is a team. The team needs to compliment each other and they need to have ideally experience within that category. And the third thing I look for is traction. If someone can't build something or create something and get it out there without money,
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
they're not going to usually do well with money because most businesses, unless you're trying to create like an open AI where you need tons of data centers and computing power, you can just get something out there and figure out ways to get the money. For example, don't eat out as much for a few months and use some of that money to start your idea up.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
If someone's not willing to go above and beyond to just get something out there and get traction, they're not going to do well with someone else's money. They're more likely to just burn it.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
Yeah, so first off, you got to hit up companies and a lot of them don't want to sell. The ones you want to buy, a lot of them will not want to sell. And the way we look at it is it's math. And in private equity, they have the saying one plus one equals three. So how can you combine what someone else has and what you have and make more money than the combined entities?
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
So a great example of this is we're in call it 20 countries. If we get a lot of customer demand for, let's say, the Middle East, which we're not big in yet, and we find an agency that we like in the Middle East, if you're listening, we are actually looking for agency in the Middle East. we would be like, all right, if they're at, call it 10 million in revenue to keep the math simple.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
And let's assume we're at 90 million to keep the math simple. Cause 90 plus 10 equals a hundred. Our goal would be to go from a hundred to 110 with the acquisition. And I'm making up numbers that are just random numbers, but let's say we have a lot of customers. and they want Middle East marketing, but we don't offer that.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
What we would do is we would say, hey, we're going to take all our customers and sell them now on the Middle East region. And that company offers it. So we predict we can make extra four or five, six, seven, eight, 10 million in extra revenue. We then also look at their customers and say, huh,
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
if we can generate five million revenue from sending our customers to the middle east and take their customers and we look to see if there's demand for their customers to want marketing in america or other parts of europe or latin america or asia and we're like okay if we can estimate we can bring five million there you combine both you're generating more revenue
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
Then we start looking, saying, oh, you have a CFO. We don't need a CFO. We already have one. Oh, you have a head of HR. We don't need a head of HR. We already have one. So you start figuring out cost synergies and savings too. So you're adding more revenue. You're becoming more efficient in saving money on the cost end. That's how we decide what to buy.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
The other type of company we look to buy is not necessarily regional based. It is, let's call it industry specific based. So let's say we only offered SEO and we offer more than that, but for this example, let's just go with that. And let's go back with, let's hypothetically say we make 90 million a year. And let's say someone else offers paid advertising services and we don't.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
And let's say they also generate 10 million a year in revenue. If we know we can take all our customers paying us 90 million a year for one product and say, hey, what's the demand for paid? And let's say it's 30 more million bucks. We close that business and we get another $30 million. We're now at $130. We take their customers that are paying $10 million.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
Maybe we get $5 million in revenue from selling them SEO. Now we're at $135 million. And that's the model with M&A that we really optimize for.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
Yeah, but sadly, you still have to pay money for it up front. Sadly. Yes. But if you use bank debt, a bank usually can lend you, if you have no investors, two and a half to three and a half times profit, assuming you're at scale. Scale being, call it $20-ish million minimum a year in profit. And if you're buying a company, if we call it six, seven times, eight times profit...
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
and you can double, triple and cut the cost down. Well, maybe at the end of the day, that six times turns into three times because of the growth and the cost savings, the bank will float it all.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
$2 million, assuming they're growing at a good pace.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
And if they're growing on an annual basis and they have low churn, they're probably going to get $12 million for that business.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
Okay. But the $30 million in revenue may only equate out to, call it, $6 million in profit.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
Correct. So it takes some time. It takes a year to two years, usually two years, to really integrate and ramp up. But at the end of the day, you're at six. You bought it for 12. All right. You only pay two times. Right. You just got to figure out how to float the money, whether it's you're using your own cash up front or bank.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
You just got to make sure you have the cash up front or you're getting investors to help you out.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
whenever you're happy and content. So people are like, oh, I can go from 100 to 200 or 20 to 30 or 40. Well, if someone's offering you enough money where you don't ever have to work again and you're happy and you genuinely want to retire or do something else, go and sell and move on. If you're getting enjoyment from continually growing the business and you don't care for the money, don't sell.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
My name is Neil Patel. I am the co-founder of NP Digital. We're a global ad agency, have a few software companies, and we spend our time just helping companies grow, drive more traffic, lead sales, and pretty much it.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
If you want to ideally plan the perfect exit, The perfect exit is selling right at the top, which is too hard to plan. But when you're growing really fast and you know it's going to slow down, that's ideally when you want to do a transaction. It's very hard to time that. But my rule of thumb with people is if you love what you're doing and you don't care for money, don't sell.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
If it's enough money and you just want the cash, you never have to worry again.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
I think it's just a good thing to give back. It's like, why do you do a toy drive each year? I don't think you do a toy drive because you need to do a toy drive. I think you just genuinely enjoy it. And if people are part of something that is a bigger cause, I think it creates amazing culture. It brings people together. And it truly gives...
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
enjoyment like you look at the smiles on the faces that you're creating by giving them something whether it's toys or money or helping out from the fires it's a nice feeling to help others you go buy something that you may think is cool like a fancy car you'll have enjoyment for a week or a month but after that it goes away you become numb to it
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
Yeah, and then you're just like, I need another card. Okay, when's this ever ending? It never ends.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
I'm married, so the wife picks, so I don't really. Some charities, I get text message. Like, I think you texted me, I don't know when, a few months ago. You're like, I need money for something, toys. Was it toys? It was toy drive, yeah. It was toy drive, and you just sent me a link, and I just donated because you sent me a link. I didn't really read it. I just said, cool, Dan's doing a toy drive.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
It's not like you're making money by giving away toys. Definitely not. All right, sounds good. It's Christmas. Someone needs toys. Click a button. But usually we look at the efficiencies of these campaigns. So when you donate to charities, a lot of the large ones have a lot of staff where the, yeah. And a lot of the money goes towards that versus actually the causes.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
And there's nothing wrong with that because you do need staff to run these charities. I don't have Bill Gates money. So I want my money, this is just my own selfish desire, to go to the people who are in need, not the people who are running the organizations, even though they do need compensation. But let the Bill Gates figure that kind of stuff out.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
On like two minutes, I'm like, I already dragged it out. I'm like, I got like two seconds, but all right.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
So a lot of what we pick is children's education, children's health, anything related to poverty with children. But we mainly focus on kids. And your toy drive was a good fit because it fit within children needing toys.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
Dude, I see like a video or image on Instagram. It was one or the other. No joke. I actually think you fill up like an arena or something like that.
The Money Mondays
The MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 109
Yeah, it was crazy. I was like, is this an arena?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
The biggest trend that we're seeing this year right now in marketing is podcasting. So people look at podcasting. We serve it over 8,000 companies. And we found that the two big trends were podcasting and AI. And here's what I mean by that. When we look at the total number of blogs out there, it's over a billion. When you look at the total number of podcasts out there, it's less than 10 million.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
It's a wide open ocean. And then people are starting to repurpose that content and use it all over the place. Because you can use a podcast content to turn it into text-based content. You can use it to turn it into social media clips, whether it's shorts or long form video.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And what's really cool is when you do podcasts, a lot of times people are doing them with other people like you and I are, and we're both going to push this on all our social profiles and we're both going to get play from this. So it's actually a really amazing win-win strategy for both of us, right? So companies are really pushing hard on podcasting and they're pushing really hard on AI.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
What can they automate? And most people look at AI like, oh, I can use open AI to help write content and I can use them to figure out how to create images. But there's much more to AI from when we interviewed companies, a big portion of what they're looking to use AI from in a marketing standpoint is analytics.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
How can you have AI analyze your analytics on a daily basis and tell you where the wastage is within your marketing campaigns and where you can cut costs and reallocate money? Because if you look at the biggest expense in marketing, it's not services. It's not writing a piece of content. It's actually spending money on paid advertising.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Look at the revenue that Google is generating and Facebook is generating. I think Google still is like a trillion dollar company or somewhere around there, depending on the month you're in. And Facebook's still a massive company. We spend so much money on ad dollars. Imagine if analytics were analyzed by AI and it told us quicker when to cut our losses.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
The biggest trend that we're seeing this year right now in marketing is podcasting. So people look at podcasting. We serve it over 8,000 companies. And we found that the two big trends were podcasting and AI. And here's what I mean by that. When we look at the total number of blogs out there, it's over a billion. When you look at the total number of podcasts out there, it's less than 10 million.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
It's a wide open ocean. And then people are starting to repurpose that content and use it all over the place. Because you can use a podcast content to turn it into text-based content. You can use it to turn it into social media clips, whether it's shorts or long-form video.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And what's really cool is when you do podcasts, a lot of times people are doing them with other people like you and I are, and we're both going to push this on all our social profiles and we're both going to get play from this. So it's actually a really amazing win-win strategy for both of us, right? So companies are really pushing hard on podcasting and they're pushing really hard on AI.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
What can they automate? And most people look at AI like, oh, I can use open AI to help write content and I can use them to figure out how to create images. But there's much more to AI from when we interviewed companies, a big portion of what they're looking to use AI from in a marketing standpoint is analytics.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
How can you have AI analyze your analytics on a daily basis and tell you where the wastage is within your marketing campaigns and where you can cut costs and reallocate money? Because if you look at the biggest expense in marketing, it's not services. It's not writing a piece of content. It's actually spending money on paid advertising.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Future-Proof Your Content and Business with AI | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Look at the revenue that Google is generating and Facebook is generating. I think Google still is like a trillion dollar company or somewhere around there, depending on the month you're in. And Facebook's still a massive company. We spend so much money on ad dollars. Imagine if analytics were analyzed by AI and it told us quicker when to cut our losses.