Owner of Kiss Metrics – Neil Patel

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Neil Patel owns KissMetrics, an analytics company, and has an amazing blog at QuickSprout.com. We talk about sales and how selling Kirby vacuums helped his skills, social media and how to attract more people to your site.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
• The Dip by Seth Godin

Check out QuickSprout.com

Thanks so much for listening! If you like these interviews subscribe via iTunes.

Any questions or comments on the podcast let me know!

Transcript:

Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast. I’m Jaime Tardy and today we have Neil Patel on the show. Neil has a bunch of awesome companies. One is called Crazy Egg and they do iTracking software. Another is Kiss Metrics which is an analytic software and he has an amazing blog at QuickSprout.com and the reason why I asked him on the show today is because I realized that I was tweeting him like crazy and sending his articles to my friends that might need it and so I figured the best way to get to know him was to ask him on the show. So thank you so much for coming on today, Neil.

NEIL PATEL: Thank you for having me.

JAIME TARDY: So first off usually I ask sort of how you started but I actually checked out your blog and it goes through and pretty much gives a rough history from high school to now and so instead of having you rehash all that stuff, I want everyone to go and check out Quick Sprout and then take a look at the about page so that way you can get up to speed. You can stop right now, go look at that and then come back. You’ll be a lot more up to date.

So what I want to ask you about is you talk about some successful stuff and some unsuccessful stuff that sort of happened when you were in high school but then you talk about your internet marketing company and the about page sort of glosses over how easy that was to grow and make huge. Can you tell me a little bit about that and was it “easy?” How did it go when you started growing that business?

NEIL PATEL: Yes, it was definitely not easy. I started off with a bit of a lucky streak and got I think within the first few months of business we were doing like around $240,000 a year in revenue, so high profit margins. But it definitely wasn’t easy – worked a lot, lost a lot of clients, gained new ones, had to deal with recessions and things like that. Had to make sure we were performing for companies. It’s a lot of hard work, right, just like any other business. It’s never really that easy to make money although people think it is. It just took a ton of hours. I think I ended up doing 70 plus hours a week for a very long time and never had a vacation.

JAIME TARDY: That’s what I want to hear because you read your about page and I was like oh and now I am making millions. I was like man that sounds way too easy and that’s the thing, success stories especially on about pages seem really easy. So let’s dive into that for a little bit. How old were you when you started that internet marketing company?

NEIL PATEL: I believe I was 16. I am 27 now.

JAIME TARDY: Yeah, okay, I was 16 and I was working at an internet service provider doing tech support. That’s amazing that you started your own company that young. How long did it take? Number one, how did you work 70 hours a week when you were in school and number two, how long did it take to really grow to be a big company?

NEIL PATEL: I didn’t work as many hours when I was 16, of course, because it was a little impossible because of class but I was one of those kids that didn’t pay attention to school. That’s bad but that’s pretty much…

JAIME TARDY: I know, right, are you supposed to tell people that? That’s sort of the funny thing. The fact that you probably cared so much more about your business than what you were learning at school. That was real stuff that you were going to need in the real world anyway. Was that beneficial to you or would you go back and change it?

NEIL PATEL: I wouldn’t change it. I even dropped out of, we had advanced placement in international baccalaureate, AP and IB classes in high school, I dropped out of almost all of them because it was too much work so I could focus on my work instead of school.

JAIME TARDY: I think that’s awesome though. I’d rather have my kids do that than go ahead and care so much because then you’re actually doing something. The other thing that I was really excited about in reading your about page is that you worked for Kirby because I worked for Kirby for about a month too and I was like 16 or 17 years old. In case anyone doesn’t know, you sell vacuum cleaners and they are like ridiculously expensive vacuum cleaners and they don’t tell you, when you go do a sales call, they don’t tell the person that you’re coming to do a vacuum sales pitch. They tell you that you get a free carpet cleaning, go!

NEIL PATEL: That’s right.

JAIME TARDY: That’s horrible, right. So how did you go and learn about sales and did you have a bad taste in your mouth after all that experience?

NEIL PATEL: I lived in Orange County and I didn’t grow up in the richest part of Orange County. So selling vacuums to an area when the average person only makes $30,000 a year when the vacuum costs like $2,000 isn’t that doable.

JAIME TARDY: I’m from Maine; I know what you’re talking about.

NEIL PATEL: Some of the people in the areas I was selling were making $70,000/$80,000 a year but most of these guys were not making anywhere near six figures. The homes only cost like $300,000/$400,000 so it’s like no one is going to end up spending a few grand on a vacuum. I would go in there, I would clean and I would do it for free. Sometimes I’d even give away free knife sets because they would give you the knife sets and I would just knock on doors, go house to house and try to convince people.

Once I realized and I know this is kind of bad, that most people wouldn’t buy vacuums from me but I realized they liked the cleaning and they would pay for it, because people were like could you clean the other room, I started charging them to clean more rooms in their house.

JAIME TARDY: That’s awesome. That’s entrepreneur at its best, right?

NEIL PATEL: It was like they’re not going to buy a vacuum cleaner this month but they want me to clean the rest of their house. They’re like you cleaned one of the carpets but the rest don’t match. Can I pay you to clean the rest and I was like I should just charge for that! That’s easier than selling the vacuum.

JAIME TARDY: That’s a perfect thing.

NEIL PATEL: If I sell the vacuum I make about a $100 in commission and I couldn’t sell one a day. If I sold one in a week I’d be lucky but I would make more consistent money and more if I charged to clean each and every single room. Same amount of work.

JAIME TARDY: Oh my gosh that’s awesome.

NEIL PATEL: Why clean rooms in 30 houses when I can clean rooms in 10 houses in a week and clean all of the rooms and get paid for it, right? I was like screw it.

JAIME TARDY: So how long did that last? Well first, that is ridiculously awesome. You just went to the market, they told you what you wanted, you just did it, see.

NEIL PATEL: That lasted for a few months and it was cash business too.

JAIME TARDY: Let’s not tell anyone about that!

NEIL PATEL: I paid taxes on it though.

JAIME TARDY: You did? You even paid your taxes on it. Did the Kirby people know about it?

NEIL PATEL: No they didn’t. I had my own sole proprietorship so I ran the money through there and I paid taxes on it.

JAIME TARDY: That’s awesome.

NEIL PATEL: My mom is a teacher so taxes always go to teachers and stuff like that so I never tried to avoid those kind of things.

JAIME TARDY: That’s awesome. Integrity even when you’re dealing with Kirby. It was one of those things where I had a horrible taste in my mouth from selling in general. I was 17, a 17-year-old girl going to a bunch of houses and going, “Hi, let me clean your carpet for you” was not nice. So leaving that, I was like I don’t like sales, I never want to do that again. But then you jumped into an internet marketing company where you had to deal with sales all the time. Were you automatically great at sales when you did it?

NEIL PATEL: I think I had a knack for sales because I even liked it at Kirby. I liked knocking on doors and try to go in there and clean someone’s house because, at the end of the day, most people say no even if it’s free because people know like hey nothing is for free. I would still try and step in there and try to persuade them on why I should clean their homes, I’d have different sales pitches and I would try different ones out and then I would even offer them a knife set all the time even they were saying offer it although we would offer it after they said no and I would try to persuade them.

I’m like look what do you have to lose? You get a free room cleaning. I’m going to give you a knife set. You have to hear me pitching a vacuum. I was up front because I noticed when I was up front, look I’ll even given you the pitch on the cleaning and I’ll be really quick because that way I won’t waste your time. Then I would even throw in there, if you don’t want to hear it, because I would tell them the pitch because Kirby wanted me to give the pitch, tell them based off their facial expression or emotion following words that if they were actually interested. Then from there just tell them oh by the way, if you want, I could clean the rest of your rooms for a fee. I cleaned half of it, I might as well have all your carpets match in color.

JAIME TARDY: That is awesome. I wish I knew you then. I think doing any sort of sales at a young age is a really good thing so that way you could learn that sort of stuff. So it must have helped you when you were doing internet marketing. Do you have any good tips for us on selling? Like if someone is going and has a service business, give us some really awesome tips on selling.

NEIL PATEL: Sure. The best way to correlate sales to people is through dating. There’s no doing sales on dating. If you act like you want something, you’re never going to get it. If something is available in large quantity, like you’re saying you’re putting yourself out there for everyone, if you create a scarcity like hey I only have one opening left or hey if you sign up now we can start in the next week but if you don’t sign up now we’re going to have to wait 30 days to sign up or to get started because of XYZ reason or we’re overwhelmed or we may not have an opening or whatever it may be, right.

It’s all about figuring out what problems people have when you’re selling, what their budget is and giving them the simplest solution that makes them interested. If you just talk about how you’re going to solve their problems and all the benefits. Don’t go to here is how I am going to solve this and blah, blah. If they want to hear it, well then go into that but get into the benefits and the solution.

JAIME TARDY: So how do you find out what their real problems are? So say you have a sales call and someone needs internet marketing. What do you do? How do you find out exactly what their true problems are?

NEIL PATEL: One I would evaluate the site beforehand and then the second thing is I would actually ask them, “Hey so what internet marketing stuff have you guys tried in the past? What problems are you experiencing? In an ideal world, how would you like it to work versus how is it right now? I would go into there, figure out what issues they’re having and then be like look – I can solve all of it and here’s what I am going to provide to you as in the results, here’s what it is going to cost you. I am going to make you X more dollars and here’s how much I want for it.

JAIME TARDY: Being 16, how do you do that? How do you have the confidence to go in and go yeah I’m going to do all this for you, you’re going to pay me really awesome money and I am definitely going to delivery it?

NEIL PATEL: I didn’t have all the confidence when I was 16. So actually I would cold call because people wouldn’t see me and after you cold call enough you get used to it. It’s just like anything, right, if you practice, you’ll get great at it. But I would cold call every day for a few hours.

JAIME TARDY: That’s awesome because usually 16 year old kids aren’t out cold calling huge businesses trying to sell them lots of stuff for money. That’s really cool.

NEIL PATEL: Yes, nothing to lose. I was just like, if I want to make money, I’ve got to go figure it out on my own.

JAIME TARDY: So was it really easy? Would you remember even your closing ratio way back then? Were you good at sales or did you have to talk to like a ton of people before you got a yes?

NEIL PATEL: I had called a ton of people. I probably had a close ratio of like 3 to 5 percent.

JAIME TARDY: Good! Yes! I love going back because we look at you now, I’ve been following you for awhile. We look at you now and you’re successful and you’re like oh Neil Patel is awesome. He writes great stuff. He has great companies. But being able to hear like how far you have come from and where you started from is huge, even if you’re 16 when you started and you’re only 27 now. It’s still really cool to be able to hear the back story.

NEIL PATEL: Everyone always thinks it’s really easy but you live and learn and there’s always another side that someone is working their tail off to get to where they are, right. There’s always the ups and downs and most people don’t really talk about the downs. They only talk about all the good stuff that happens.

JAIME TARDY: Exactly. So let’s talk a little bit about your site right now Quicksprout.com. Why did you even start a blog when you had companies going on?

NEIL PATEL: To drive more business to the companies.

JAIME TARDY: Which it worked, right? So it was definitely a strategic thing to try and get more clients.

NEIL PATEL: It was strategic and it still is strategic. It’s very, very effective to go out there and create a blog to drive business. You just have to make sure you’re blogging on things that are related to your business, because if you blog on things that are not related to your business you’re not really going to make that much money from it.

JAIME TARDY: So we hear a lot about blogs though. Oh everybody should blog but really what are the core benefits of blogging and who should be blogging right now, because we don’t all need to be blogging for our business.

NEIL PATEL: Anyone who has a service base business I think it’s worth it, product maybe, right, you could blog that as well. But yet anyone who has a big enough business, like if you’re trying to make a business into seven, eight figures, I think blogging is worth it. If you’re trying to create a six-figure business, you don’t really have to waste your time blogging to create a hundred grand in revenue because there are other ways you can do that in a much more easy fashion.

You’ve got to figure out what problems are your ideal customers facing? Start blogging on all the solutions and giving advice on how to fix all the problems and just give it away for free.

JAIME TARDY: So I think what you said before is ridiculously interesting and the reason is, is we get told right now that people that don’t have a lot of money to start a business should do a blog because it’s easy to start and then you have all these people starting blogs that don’t really know that much about business and then they think it’s, you know, and when in fact the blog is just a marketing tactic, but it’s an inexpensive marketing tactic that just takes time. So why do you say, you know, six figures you probably don’t need one but seven and eight figures you do?

NEIL PATEL: It’s much harder to scale a business into seven, eight, nine figures. I’ve never done a nine-figure business nonetheless. Yet the reason you need one is you have to look for different ways to actually go out there, get leads or customers and diversify. You can’t rely on one basket for all your customers. Like TV advertising may work great for some people but it won’t work great for everyone. Blogging may work great, but it may not work at all but you have got to test out different channels and mediums about what’s working and double down on it.

JAIME TARDY: So give us some advice, because you’re the man at blogging. So tell us, there’s so many blogs and I get people emailing me that have started their blog and it’s not going as well as they wanted it to, they’re not getting as many eyeballs to it and you’re apparently, your website specifically said, “Your gift is getting eyeballs to websites.” Give us some of your gifts right now and tell us what’s the best way to get eyeballs to our blogs that might now be doing the way we want it to go.

NEIL PATEL: Sure. Social media, so leverage Twitter, follow everyone who is following your competitor. Start tweeting at people in your space, building relationships. Once you do that, when you start writing blog posts, tweet out a link and you’ll be shocked on how many retreats and follow ups you get and stuff like that. You can do similar things to Facebook. Start friending influencers, start posting interesting things on your Facebook profile. You’ll get more likes and you gain most of that revenue when you promote stuff on your website, it’s more likely to pick up some steam and do well.

You can do some things with like Stumble Upon and Pinterest and those sites. But the best way to really promote are through Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn.

JAIME TARDY: Let’s talk about that. I’m a big fan of social media too, but my question is and this is actually about me, right, so I interview millionaires. I’m totally getting free Neil Patel consulting here. Sweet, that’s why I did this interview, right? It’s funny, I have amazing interviews, I get emails all the time about people saying how awesome they are and I get like almost no retweets. Facebook, I’ll get Facebook shares and stuff but almost no retweets and I’m confused as to being surprised at how many I get, right, because I get like 5 or 10 retweets on this. I have a good following so I am a little bit surprised.

NEIL PATEL: How many followers do you have?

JAIME TARDY: What was that?

NEIL PATEL: How many followers do you have?

JAIME TARDY: On Twitter I have like 2,500 and on Facebook I have about 2,500.

NEIL PATEL: You only get like 5 retweets on Twitter when you post an interview?

JAIME TARDY: Maybe, maybe yeah.

NEIL PATEL: Have you had the guys you’ve interviewed tweet it out too?

JAIME TARDY: I have interviewed David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals. He tweeted it out. Michael Port has tweeted it out, so a couple people have, not everybody.

NEIL PATEL: You should make it a requirement that they all tweet it out for sure.

JAIME TARDY: Okay.

NEIL PATEL: I’m assuming that when David tweeted it out you got more than five retweets.

JAIME TARDY: Yes, I did.

NEIL PATEL: The key is get them to tweet out.

JAIME TARDY: Thanks.

NEIL PATEL: It works well.

JAIME TARDY: Hey Neil, do you want to retweet this? So how do I do that? How do I go, “Okay, it’s a requirement.”

NEIL PATEL: Well you do it in a friendly way. Like, “Hey Neil I just posted up the interview of you, if you can tweet it out to your followers, I’d greatly appreciate it.” Usually most people respond back saying, “Sure, why not?” If they ignore you, then just send a follow up email like a week later like, “Hey Neil, just wanted to check in with you to see if you saw my last email. I’d really appreciate it if you could tweet it out and for your convenience, you know, here’s a tweet you can just copy and paste it.”

JAIME TARDY: I see mixergy in doing stuff like that. I remember Andrew saying that he does it that way. All right. I need to actually follow some of the advice that I sort of know I should be doing and I haven’t done it yet so thanks again for that and reminding me. So say we have our blogs and we’re starting to do a lot more social media. How much time should we be spending on this because it takes up a lot of time and if you don’t necessarily see a return right away, a lot of people stop.

NEIL PATEL: I say you should have a full time person for it assuming your company is large enough. I’d say at least an hour to two hours a day on it.

JAIME TARDY: Now do you do your stuff? I love the way you do it too. I’ll tell everybody, in case they don’t already follow you even though I know they should. So you on Facebook and Twitter really talk about quotes and you do a lot of like inspirational kind of stuff, which I love and then your blog is really hard core information that’s really good. So being able to follow you on Facebook and Twitter is great because we can sort of see your personality a little bit and also get some inspiration from your quotes. Now do you do those?

NEIL PATEL: I do.

JAIME TARDY: So are they already scheduled ahead of time kind of a thing?

NEIL PATEL: I spend the weekend doing them.

JAIME TARDY: So you go ahead, you come up with it all at once and then you go ahead and do that. So you’ve got some really good time techniques to try and save some time with this stuff. So tell us what else do you have in social media to make it work better for us?

NEIL PATEL: I do have someone helping me out. Sometimes I need ideas and stuff like that.

JAIME TARDY: What? You’re perfectly all right.

NEIL PATEL: I’m not the one scheduling it. So I may come up with the tweets, I just send it to them and they just end up putting it in the scheduler and it goes out for me. But yeah, I do get help from that kind of stuff. It’s time consuming. You’d be shocked, even when I write a blog post, I may write it and I write it in MS Word. I don’t put up my own blog posts. I just write it and I tell someone, “Hey log in and post it.” It takes time, an hour sometimes, to take a blog post from Word and format it and add in a picture. I’m like I’m not going to spend an hour on that. I need people to help me out there.

Then I have someone who helps me out with emails. Then I have someone else who helps me look for stuff in my, I’ll go through my Twitter stream and Facebook and all that kind of stuff every day. I do have someone who helps me, who will say, “Hey Neil, I saw this tweet, this is really important you should get to it sooner than later” and then I’ll respond to it in the middle of the day or respond to it at night or whenever I get time.

JAIME TARDY: Nice. So you do go through all the stuff yourself. So it is not as though you outsource your own Twitter stream or anything like that. Good. That’s good to know.

NEIL PATEL: It’s not you then, right. It’s not personal.

JAIME TARDY: Well exactly and that’s sort of the whole point of social media. So it feels icky if someone else has somebody doing it and then you don’t know whether or not it’s you or not. Okay, awesome. So how many people do you have in Kiss Metrics right now?

NEIL PATEL: Twenty something?

JAIME TARDY: You’re so funny. I love it when people are like I don’t know, there’s a bunch of people. Okay, twenty something.

NEIL PATEL: I think we just signed a lease for a new office today. I have no clue.

JAIME TARDY: Nice, congratulations.

NEIL PATEL: I don’t go to the office.

JAIME TARDY: At all?

NEIL PATEL: I live in Seattle and that’s far away from me.

JAIME TARDY: Where are they based out of?

NEIL PATEL: San Francisco, California.

JAIME TARDY: Oh.

NEIL PATEL: And I also don’t do well, I’m not the best team player. I’m like a very nitpick slave driver, which is not polite and it’s not good. I can create a really bad office environment really quickly because I’m like stop wasting time, get back to work.

JAIME TARDY: So you have to be hours apart in order for it to be okay. That’s great.

NEIL PATEL: The thing with the team that we have, they’re awesome people. They get their own stuff done at their own time. Whatever works for them. As long as the work gets done, I don’t care.

JAIME TARDY: So how many hours do you spend on Kiss Metrics right now, like a week?

NEIL PATEL: 55/60.

JAIME TARDY: Okay. Cool. So you’re really involved in it, you’re just not there.

NEIL PATEL: Yes.

JAIME TARDY: Awesome.

NEIL PATEL: I probably spend like two to three hours talking to team members every day over the phone or Skype.

JAIME TARDY: Which is cool, then they can close the screen if they don’t want to talk to you anymore, right?

NEIL PATEL: I think my nephew did that to me the other day. He didn’t want me to see so he took the computer screen and he was like close and he just shut it on me.

JAIME TARDY: See and I love that because how old is he?

NEIL PATEL: Almost 2.5 maybe getting close to 3 I’m guessing. I don’t know.

JAIME TARDY: I’m asking hard questions, Neil. I’m sorry. It’s funny because you post about that stuff on Facebook and I think, and I have a 3 year old little girl, so it’s really cool because it starts to build a connection like Neil is cool. He actually likes kids. He’s not this only about business, nothing to do with anything else. So it’s really cool to sort of see the personal side of the social media, which is really good.

NEIL PATEL: I love kids. I even got him the matching robe and stuff like that. Cool stuff like bubbles for his bath. He never experienced bubbles until I got him bubbles for the bath.

JAIME TARDY: Aww!

NEIL PATEL: I get him little stuff. I got him like an RC drift car. It’s supposed to be like for 20 year olds but nonetheless it’s kind of cool.

JAIME TARDY: You sound like my brother. He gives my kids like, it’s supposed to be age 12 and up, like this huge robot. I’m like what are you doing? Thank you for doing that I appreciate stuff like that.

NEIL PATEL: I got him an iPod when he was like six months old. Then he broke the brand new iPod too or iPad or whatever it’s called. It sucked but at least there was a warranty and plus he had fun with it.

JAIME TARDY: He had fun with it. That’s awesome. But that’s what’s so cool about it is that you seem like a real person instead of necessarily just being a company. Kiss Metrics is a big company and instead we know Neil instead of this big company. So what do you suggest, if someone is doing something like you were back then, dealing with starting up Kiss Metrics, what would you say to someone who is doing a start up that’s really looking to build it as fast as they can, of course. What entrepreneur is looking to go slow? So what advice do you have for someone that’s new to that?

NEIL PATEL: So if you’re new to a start up how do you grow faster? You raise venture capital. You either do that or you figure out how to make some sales as quick as possible. You don’t have to have a finished product or service. You’d be shocked on how many companies out there sell before they actually have their finished product or service. It’s like get money as soon as possible because that’s the quickest way to grow.

JAIME TARDY: So how do we know whether it’s a good idea or not because a lot of the times we get people that are like oh this is a great idea. I interviewed a guy two weeks ago that had an award winning business plan and he went out and it failed absolutely miserably and he was like oh that sucks. He had quit his job and everything and now he is a millionaire so now he can sort of tell the successful side of it but what do you suggest for people to really find out that idea so that way it’s successful instead of unsuccessful?

NEIL PATEL: You create a minimal viable product. Eric Ries has this whole lean start up thing. Follow it. He has a whole book called The Lean Startup. That will teach you how to get things out there really quick and find out if people like them so you don’t waste too much time or money.

JAIME TARDY: Awesome. I just recommended that book last week at the last interview. So I love Eric Ries too. Is that how you started Kiss Metrics or did you already sort of know the way it was going in Eric sort of plan or did you do it on your own?

NEIL PATEL: We did it on our own but we failed a lot and we started getting into a lot more lean startup stuff when Eric became our advisor years ago and since then we’ve been really into the lean startup.

JAIME TARDY: So do you recommend getting venture capital? I know for Crazy you said that you couldn’t get venture capital. Would you have really tried to like if you could have gone back, it would have been a company that you would have wanted to do that with? Do you like venture capital?

NEIL PATEL: I do. Kiss Metrics is Crazy 2.0. It spun out of Crazy Egg. We didn’t get it for Crazy Egg but we got it for Kiss Metrics, a whole new idea that we were going to create a new Crazy Egg but we decided to go with a new company called Kiss Metrics because it is easier to pitch. I do like it, right. You grow so much faster when you have money versus not having money.

JAIME TARDY: But you’re beholden. Chris Guillebeau just came out with a book called The Hundred Dollar Startup and I am giving it away on my blog today. This interview will come out later so everybody it’s too bad, the giveaway is already done, but he sort of talks about being able to start without any money because dealing with venture capital takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of work and you might not get it and then you’re beholden to a bunch of venture capitalists that want to make you grow as fast as you can and you have to work as hard as you can. So if somebody is going into it, do you still suggest, you know, no matter what go for venture capital or it depends on the company?

NEIL PATEL: It depends on the company. Not every company has a venture backed product. It works out great. If you want to create a few million dollar company, if you have some cash of your own, great use that. If you want to create a very large hundred million dollar company, it’s much harder when you don’t have someone giving you cash to get it up and running, because you know what, even if you’re the first out the gate, someone behind you will want to put that next billion up in the same space probably can cut it easy with that $10/$20 million dollars from venture capitalists.

JAIME TARDY: Definitely. So what about confidence though? I mean going in and you think your idea is really good, do you have to have like a ton of confidence to go and say I am going to go the venture capital route?

NEIL PATEL: No. You just have to be willing to learn and get referrals from people and introductions and go out there and just try your best.

JAIME TARDY: It’s funny because I have interviewed a ton of people and some that have done venture capital and a lot of them say that you don’t really need to do it most of the time and you really are talking about doing that side of things, probably because you’re in software, right, because it’s usually a better venture backed way of going about it.

NEIL PATEL: For me, that is a good point there, the type of businesses I create you definitely need venture capital for, but for most companies you don’t always have to get venture capital even if it is web based. My specialty is enterprise software and enterprise software without sales forces and stuff like that and your ROI on sales forces don’t kick in, in many cases, until like a year later, because it’s the life and body of a customer.

You’re talking about like a lot of these sales guys can end up easily getting paid, you’re not going to get a good sales guy for $100,000. Some big companies are paying these good sales guys $300,000/$400,000 a year and you can’t compete and hire the good ones unless you have some venture capital.

JAIME TARDY: Definitely or you hire a crappy salesman and they can’t sell and therefore you have no company sooner or later anyway, so what’s the point? That’s really good to know. So tell me a little bit about what your plans are going forward with Kiss Metrics and with your blog.

NEIL PATEL: Sure, my blog is just a passion. I don’t really care if I make much money from it or anything like that or even if I lose money, that’s fine. But my main goal is focus on Kiss Metrics and create a big business and try to go after my competitor.

JAIME TARDY: Let’s talk about that because they are a big competitor of yours. So what are you trying to do to go after them?

NEIL PATEL: One I’m trying to recruit their sales reps. I used to tweet a lot, like every day, requesting if you’re a sales a rep and want a better job, let me know.

JAIME TARDY: Did that work?

NEIL PATEL: It did. We actually got a few applicants. The other thing that really do more than anything else is we just try to put a better product, because there is a big dinosaur owned by W now, right.

JAIME TARDY: Oh really?

NEIL PATEL: They are that one point whatever billion dollar company that got gobbled up by Adobe, if I move faster than they are because sooner or later more and more of their customers are going to move our way which they have been over the last year or two.

JAIME TARDY: Nice, awesome. I don’t want to take up too much of your time, I think I could talk to you forever because I think this is awesome, but I always ask two questions sort of at the end, or I try to. One is what are some books or resources that you’ve turned to, I mean going from 16 entrepreneur to where you are now that have really been pivotal for you.

NEIL PATEL: The Lean Startup was one of them and Guy Kawasaki The Art of the Start. Another one is The Dip by Seth Godin. Those are some books that I would check out if you want to be an entrepreneur and figure out how to create a business online.

JAIME TARDY: That’s awesome. I interviewed Guy and he’s awesome. I just recommended The Dip too so it seems like there is sort of this general a lot of books that a lot of people are reading and I think that’s really cool so thanks for doing that. So the last question that I always ask is what’s one action that listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million?

NEIL PATEL: Go and solve a problem. At the end of the day, it’s hard to say I want to make a million bucks. It’s easy to say I am going to create a business that’s going to solve a real pain point. Try working on solving it and getting customers that are willing to pay for it. That’s how you’ll make your million dollars. You’re not going to make a million dollars saying, “I want to make a million dollars. What do I need to make a million?” That’s hard. It’s much easier to find a problem, solve it and the money will come if you are actually solving a real problem that people are willing to pay for.

JAIME TARDY: Awesome. Definitely and keep those eyes and ears open because there is opportunities and problems all over the place. We just need to actually look for them. So where can we find you online? I mean I already follow you and will definitely link you up but go ahead and promote to whatever you want to promote right now.

NEIL PATEL: On my blog Quicksprout.com.

JAIME TARDY: Perfect and I will link that all up. Everybody should check that out anyway. If you’re looking for more traffic, Neil is the guy to go to and more sales, not just traffic, but sales too. So thank you so much for coming on today, Neil, I really appreciate it.

NEIL PATEL: Take care and have a good one.

JAIME TARDY: You too!

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