Summary
- I started from humble beginnings in low-income housing, watching my parents struggle financially, but their perseverance taught me the value of hard work and grit.
- Understanding your parents’ history and struggles can provide motivation and insight for achieving your own goals. Spend time learning their stories.
- I learned early on that saving money and being resourceful, like my parents, can significantly improve your financial situation over time.
- As a young entrepreneur, I discovered the importance of not just looking for immediate outcomes but focusing on the small, daily efforts that contribute to long-term success.
- At 16, I realized the key to wealth was to stop trading time for money. Instead, I looked at how successful companies created value without constant effort.
- Learning marketing became crucial after my initial business attempts failed due to a lack of audience. By teaching myself marketing, I increased my website traffic drastically.
- Gaining skills and information can be more valuable than money when you're starting out. I improved my knowledge and abilities to grow from nothing.
- Building relationships and reaching out to people who can connect you to opportunities can lead to unexpected success.
- I grew my first consulting business by offering results-based deals: clients only paid me if I delivered value, which built my credibility and income.
- Starting Crazy Egg was a lesson in patience and persistence. Take note that it can take 3 to 10 years to build a business you're proud of.
- Focus is crucial. Rather than jumping between projects, dedicating time to one venture can lead to substantial achievements over a decade.
- When fundraising, remember that a "no" can simply mean "not now." Use feedback for improvement and try again.
- Sometimes settling lawsuits is the best business decision to protect your company and resources, even if it feels like swallowing your pride.
- Starting NP Digital was a result of listening to what my audience truly wanted and offering services that leveraged my expertise.
- Building a strong personal brand involves giving away valuable content for free, which can attract a loyal audience ready to purchase more substantial services or products.
- To reach nine-figure revenues, I learned hiring exceptional talent is key. Successful leaders know their strengths and recruit the right people to fill gaps.
- Recognize the value of retaining clients and creating a source of recurring revenue, which is essential for sustainable business growth.
Video
How To Take Action
I suggest starting by understanding your roots and using them as a source of motivation. Take time to sit with your parents or elders and listen to their stories. Their experiences can teach you about hard work and persistence.
Another simple action is to focus on saving money and finding creative ways to be resourceful. Even when you’re earning small amounts, like from a part-time job, saving diligently can help you invest in your future goals.
To avoid trading time for money forever, think about how to create value. Instead of working harder, work smarter by setting up systems that can make money even when you’re not actively working.
Learn marketing, even if you have to teach yourself. There are tons of free resources online. Understanding how to promote your product or service can drastically impact your success.
Try building connections. Reach out to people who inspire you or are in fields you're interested in. A simple email or message can lead to unexpected opportunities and help you grow.
Embrace the importance of patience and focus. Commit to one project, and dedicate consistent, daily effort toward it. Success often takes time, sometimes years, but dedication compounds into remarkable achievements.
Lastly, if you're thinking of starting a business, consider offering a value-first proposition, where clients only pay for results. This builds trust and can open more doors for long-term success.
Quotes by Author
"You can actually get somewhere in life"
"America where you can really not have that much money at all but also be exposed to wealth all the time"
"It's all the little things that you do in life that add up"
"People think that if they can't acquire money then they have nothing and you're stuck but you can always acquire information"
"Your real job as a Founder is to hire people who are amazing and have done it before"
Full Transcript
I've never told this story before how I went from being an insecure kid living in low-income housing to making nine figures a year in Revenue getting my business number 21 on the Inc 5000 list Forbes called me a top 10 marker in the world and I've been able to help underprivileged kids by doing things like building schools from I've never wanted to talk about this stuff because it feels like bragging I've realized that explaining how I did all of this step by step without Rich parents or any connections could be useful or at least inspiring to many of you who are interested in marketing business and Entrepreneurship but for me to teach you that I have to start by taking you back to 1972 Uganda in 1972 the president of Uganda ordered all of the Indian population including my father to leave the country Uganda will be independent after this my decision after I want to see that the whole Cala street is not full of Indians it must be proper black and administration in those shops is run by the ugand giving them 90 days to find somewhere else to go this is crucial because I don't think you can achieve your greatest goals until you truly understand what your parents achieved before you when my dad got kicked out of Uganda he was able to go to the United Kingdom cuz they took him in and eventually he met my mom through an introduction by family members my mom moved from India to the United Kingdom with my dad and that's where my sister and I were born and within a few years of me being born we moved to sunny Southern California because my mom didn't like the cold weather during that time in the United Kingdom my dad didn't have an amazing job nor did my mom he didn't have the opportunity to go to college because at that time he needed to earn money to put food on the table and when we came to America we ended up moving into loow income housing my parents didn't have enough money luckily some of their family members helped out but every month they were spending more money than they were making I still remember when my mom would pick up pennies and dimes off the ground and to save up enough money to pay for for tacos from Taco Bell now by no means were my parents perfect angels and you don't have to have parents who are perfect but all their struggles all the issues that they went to taught me that if you just keep pushing hard in life and you really try and you don't let anything get you down you can actually get somewhere in life now if you don't know your parents life story you should take an hour or two and just interview them or talk to them because it allows you to understand their motivation their commitment and it'll help you figure out your true meaning that you need to create your own success this brings me to the Second Step along this journey which is growing up in low-income housing in California there's something unique about America where you can really not have that much money at all but also be exposed to wealth all the time I didn't grow up with much money at all my dad's first job he got it from our uncle and my aunt gave us the Oldsmobile which we really loved the Velvet seats and my mom was a teacher in India but her credentials didn't transfer in America so she took night college class classes and she worked for a preschool for free for 6 months she ped me and my sister in a stroller because we only had one car a few miles each way and she worked for free each and every single day until they were willing to give her a job for money and we finally saved up enough money to buy a house none of my parents ever made more than a 100 Grand a year but as a kid I constantly saw other kids with Mercedes or even watching TV I would watch MTV Cribs and see people's fancy houses and their Ferrari and it was so close right being in Southern California you see all these people in Los Angeles with tons of money now this was important for me to see because it made me realize that there was another life I could had I just did not have it right now and I watched my parents become really Scrappy they saved every little Penny they wouldn't even need out at Taco Bell or Subway that often because it cost money and when they would get us Taco Bell a lot of times it was for my sister and I but not for themselves and what I found was if you can save money be Scrappy and invest it wisely you can end up having a better life over time it just takes time as an entrepreneur a lot of people are looking for that gold at the very end but they're looking for it right now it's all the little things that you do in life that add up that'll help you get there if you want to achieve that goal in the next year or 5 years or 10 years and you just put a stamp and saying I'm going to get this in 10 years it doesn't mean it's going to happen what really matters is all the little things you do each and every single day but if you take those little steps for granted you won't achieve your goals the next stage of my journey began when I realized that I'd never get rich enough if I didn't figure out how to stop trading time for money when I was 16 years old I was working at not Berry Farm I was making $5.75 an hour and I would even clean restrooms and sweep up vomit because if you did that you would get an extra50 cents an hour but at that time my sister was working for Oracle Financial Consultant she was his assistant and he was making more than $200 an hour so I was going to monster.com and finding out the qualifications to become a Oracle Financial Consultant I didn't even know what Oracle was at that time I was taking AP and IB classes during high school and I was even doing nighttime Community College classes so that way I can graduate faster and become an oracle Financial Consultant like my sister's boss was but what I realized going through monster.com was I wasn't qualified to become an oracle Financial Consultant acquired a college degree from at least a fouryear University and you had to have all these Oracle certifications I didn't want to wait so when I was on this monster.com website and I saw that this jaw board was making hundreds of millions of dollars I realized that if I made 1% of what they made I would be a rich kid so I ended up going out there and decided to copy monster.com I realize at this point if your competitors are making a ton of money and they're in a large Market if you just make a fraction of what they make you'll still do well a lot of the richest people are often middlemen they're not people who trade their time time directly for money they're the people who figure out how to build something that creates its own value for example with monster.com they get paid every time a company posts a job they're a middleman and in essence they're getting paid every time that happens without spending any time doing manual labor this is also why many great entrepreneurs are a special form of lazy or impatient that actually forces them to think of how to do something higher leverage and maximize input to Output ratios and this is exactly what led me to learning the importance of marketing I saved up enough money from picking up trash at nottsbury farm and cleaning restrooms to pay for someone to help me build a jobboard like monster.com I paid someone $1,500 and it took a few months for it to go live but once I launched that job board no one came to the website I assumed that people would just find out about it and they would just come I was ignorant I didn't understand the concept of marketing so I found a marketing firm in Canada and I gave them every last honey that I had they spent a lot of hours but I got no results I was frustrated and I was broke and I felt like I was at rock bottom but instead of giving up I was like screw it I'm just going to learn marketing myself there was really no YouTube at this time or online courses I was just reading stuff online and experimenting people think that if they can't acquire money then they have nothing and you're stuck but you can always acquire information and find a way to lift yourself out of being broke and that's exactly what happened my my website went from zero visitors to over 60,000 visitors a month in less than 6 months once I realized I had figured out a valuable skill I started to build in public and this is how my career really took off I started even going out there and hitting up other websites in the space and begging them to link to my website by doing all of this I started ranking higher on Google and funny enough my nighttime college class was a public speech class and my first speech was on how Google's algorithm works because that's what I was doing with my own website and someone in that class was actually looking for someone like me they worked at this power supply manufacturer and they introduced me to their boss and I got my first contract making me $5,000 a month all when I was just 16 years old and that client referred me to another client which in total caused me to get three more customers so now I was making $20,000 a month using what I learned online to help a few companies get get their website more traffic but then I thought hey why should I just wait for other customers to refer me business why can't I go out there on my own and get clients as well so every day after school I would run home I would go online to Google and I would call every single person that was paying for advertising and I'll would be like hey you know how you're spending all this money on Google ads what happens if I can get you this traffic for free if I get you results pay me if I don't get you results you don't have to pay me a single penny and over time my business started growing so you know that $220,000 a month I was originally making it grew to eventually 50,000 a month then over 100,000 a month and then to low Millions a year at that point I sort of thought I had made it but then I started to burn out from all the Consulting I was doing I was constantly working and realized I was right back to trading my time for money so I decided to try my hand at software and made my third attempt at starting a business so the reason I started crazy was because we had a customer that was paying us for advertising at the time they were spending millions of dollars a year in ads but majority of their spend was being wasted they were getting no Roi so I thought what if I created a tool that showed people what marketing efforts are making the money and what's not where are people getting stuck on their website and what they can fix so that way they can make more revenue and when I started crazy it was painful and slow in the early days I didn't know much about coding I had to hire people and a lot of the people I hired failed so then I had to go through quite a few people before I found the right person that could help us build the product that we wanted even once it was built getting it off the ground barely anyone was paying for it at the beginning and the big thing I learned from this is if you start a business yeah you can get Traction in your first month your first year even the first few years but it really takes 3 years to start getting traction it takes 5 years to have something that you're going to be proud of and in 10 years you'll have something that you would have never imagined if I could go back in time and give my younger self advice the one thing I'll tell myself is to focus too many people including me have had add where we want to keep going from business after business after business instead of focusing if you focus and put all your effort into just one thing and you're willing to give it three four 5 10 years sure you'll get to millions in profit but at the end of 10 years you'll have a much bigger business as well right as crazyc was starting to gain momentum we started hearing about a bunch of guys investing hundreds of millions of dollars into tech companies in a little town in California people were calling Silicon Valley I went to one of my buddies who was a startup entrepreneur we had this idea for a crazy EG 2.0 it was called kissmetrics and my friend offered me a friends and family round of $600,000 he was willing to write a $225,000 check and reach out to a few of his friends to try to get more money and then I would have to reach out to other people to fill up the rest of the round but here's a kicker I actually wanted more than $600,000 I knew from my experience with crazy egg money can go really fast even if you count all your pennies I actually wanted a million dollars so I took that term sheet I went to Silicon Valley and pitched a lot of venture capital firms to give me more cash as I shopped around the term sheet I was able to get a million and roughly after a year those investors helped me get another $3 million so in total I had 4 million bucks what I learned throughout that whole process is when investor tells you no no just means not right now see that investor who gave us a check for a million dollar I actually pitched him crazy egg and when I pitched him crazy egg they said no but they're willing to fund crazy 2.0 which was called kiss metrics so when someone tells you no don't take that as a no just take that as not right now get feedback from them improve upon those things and then go back to them but of course the emotional roller coaster of Entrepreneurship continues since right as we were starting to break even and almost get profitable we got sued there was an article on Wired Magazine that was being published it was saying that we're sharing our data in our analytics platform between companies so for example if you're Macy's they were saying I was sharing that data with Nordstroms the FTC slapped us with the investigation but we passed with flying colors at the same time though we had a class action lawsuit and our lawyer told us it's actually cheaper in many cases to settle than it is to have that ego and show that you beat someone in court what we ended up doing was swallowing our ego and settling and eventually we were able to get this done for just am measly $50,000 which we use the money on a company's balance sheet and the insurance company paid for the rest of the settlement which was roughly $450,000 in business there's going to be some times where you feel that your Eagle's just getting squashed on and you feel like you have no Pride you got to do what's best for the business not what's best for your feelings but even after the settlement the company never fully recovered the investors put in a new CEO and the CEO was terrible he even paid his girlfriend $50,000 to redo our logo at one point and over time they kept making decisions like that and the company started running out of money and eventually owning very a little to nothing of the company I decided to walk away and focus on bootstrapping instead of leveraging investor dollars at this point I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do but I knew I enjoyed teaching so I just went all in on content I grew my audience from zero visitors to a million on my website and over a million followers between all my social media profiles combined the way I did this was I Contin produced tons of educational content that people were used to paying for and I gave it all away for free by giving away a lot of amazing information for free that people are used to paying for you can quickly build up an audience because you're offering much more value than what you're asking for this is why I was also named one of the top markers in the world by Forbes or one of the top influencers in the world by The Wall Street Journal it even felt great that I was getting recognized by people and it taught me if you want to really build up your audience you can't do so by just taking a picture those followers those visitors they don't monetize well to do well you have to give a lot of value in a big Market a market where people are willing to spend a lot of money for for example people aren't willing to spend that much money for you to make them laugh but they're willing to spend a lot of money for software Solutions like Salesforce or Microsoft and what I decided to do with that audience was sell informational products I started selling courses that would teach people how to grow their traffic just like I did and even though I was giving away so much of my information for free I found that packaging up information in an easy digestible format and giving them calls to hold people accountable it caused people to be willing to spend money for that but these info procs that I was giving never generated more than $600,000 a month in revenue and I didn't like that model because I couldn't figure out how to make it scale into a bigger company plus no one was willing to buy a company that was tied to a personal brand like mine you can build up your personal brand and that's great but people aren't willing to buy a company with a huge multiple when it's too relying on a personal brand versus a corporate brand like Coca-Cola most people don't even know who runs Coca-Cola but that brand is worth billions of dollars as a Founder sometimes you have to follow the demand and what people are saying and what people said to me is they didn't want my courses they actually rather have paid me to do the marketing for them and this is why I decided to start another agency called NP digital where we just did the marketing for people instead of them paying us for advice and it was actually my roommate who finally made me take the first step in finding that perfect vehicle I was getting thousands of emails a day from people reading and watching and consuming my content and my room come up with the idea of partnering with other ad agencies for Revenue share so what we were doing is we were sending other agencies leads and an exchange they were giving us a revenue share now I had an issue that I said to my roommate if people were pissed off I didn't want them to hate me because I would tarnish my brand so we created a clause where if people were unhappy with the agencies we were referring leads to they would have to give the decline of full refund and we quickly got up to $500,000 a month in income from our Revenue share which was pretty much pure profit but then we realized that that Revenue didn't make any sense based on the number of leads that we were referring out since my blog was getting 6 million visitors and we were generating over 30,000 leads a month we knew that the other agencies had a terrible close rate which meant tons of Revenue was being left on the table we couldn't figure out how to get the other agencies to close better and it was our final straw and this is why we started our our own agency and as a Founder you need to know your numbers like the back of your hand something may seem good but when you look at the numbers you can find things that are wrong and adjust so that way you can improve even more for example it doesn't matter how many leads you're getting what matters is your close rate your Revenue your lifetime value of your customer so once we started to Ad Agency it immediately did very well but there was a single secret to success that took it to over nine figures a year in Revenue so we did 5 million in our first year and we rough broke even second year 18.6 million in Revenue with 1.1 in profit and our third year we did 32 million in revenue and 8.8 million in profit and we kept doubling and growing and the business really exploded I was speaking at conferences I was generating tens of thousand of leads a month and my co-founder was really good at sales that's what helped us get to the first 10 million a year in Revenue but it wasn't what actually pushed us into nine figures because you can have a huge brand and get tons of leads and even tons of sales but if you can't keep clients and create reoccurring Revenue then you'll Flatline your real job as a Founder is to hire people who are amazing and have done it before fast forward today we're well into the nine figures in Revenue we're profitable and very little of my Revenue comes from my personal brand Neil Patel it comes from hiring amazing people see I always thought as an entrepreneur to do well you got to be smart and amazing like Elon mus but even if you look at Elon or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg none of them are the sole reason the company is doing well look at the leadership that they've put in place and it took me so many years to learn that I'm not at the caliber of Elon or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates and I never will be I don't have the intellect that they do but the thing that's helped me do well and make all my money is hire people who have continually gone promotions who have worked for my competitors if you enjoyed listening to my story check out this video on how you can dominate against a competition with AI in 2025
