About

If you think about all the people that have high paying jobs, you’ll notice that some are talented and others are not. Regardless of how good they are, they are all perceived as “rock stars”. So what is this rock star formula anyhow? Six months ago I didn’t know the answer, but now I think I’ve got it. If you want to become a “rock star” in your industry, you have come to the right place.

If you don’t think good things can happen to you, just look at me. Just two years ago no one in the online marketing industry knew about me, yet in the last few months I have been covered in multiple trade publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur Magazine. I’ve also had job offers in the six figures that would have let me finish college and work from home. A six-figure income isn’t enough to retire, but at 21 years old these weren’t bad offers.

With a bit of hard work and a few other tricks, you can become a rock star in your industry and get the reputation that makes money.

The Neil Patel Story

The Early Years
On April 24, 1985, I was born in London, England. From the beginning I had entrepreneurship in my blood, but I’ll get into that a bit later. When I was 2 years old, my parents decided to move to sunny Orange County, California. At first we struggled a bit just like most first generation Indians; my mom’s first job was a non-paid teaching gig, in which she had to walk a few miles to get to everyday with my sister and I. My dad on the other hand worked for one of my uncles’, his job didn’t pay much, but we were grateful for the opportunity my uncle gave him. But because of my mom’s aggressive nature and my dad’s hard work ethic, my sister and I were able to live a middle class lifestyle.

Throughout my childhood, I was surround by entrepreneurs. All of my uncles on my mom’s side had multiple businesses, which lead them to all be successful. My uncles entrepreneurship rubbed off on my mom which encourage her to start her own home daycare business, but it never revenued more than 100k a year and my dad was satisfied with his average job. This meant my sister and I would not live a “rich” lifestyle.

Entrepreneurship
As I started growing up, I always thought about what I could do so that my lifestyle could change. During this time I started my first year at John F. Kennedy High School. My cousin, who is a year older than me, was selling burned music CDs to students at the time. I saw how he was making a few bucks so I started doing the same thing within my freshmen class. I quickly realized that I could only make a few dollars a CD, so I started selling bootleg movies.

Soon after I was known as the kid in high school who was selling anything pirated. I then decided to capitalize on this by purchasing cable black boxes on Ebay and selling them to my classmates as well as their parents. Business was booming and I made a few grand in profit.

Realizing that there wasn’t a long-term career in selling pirated stuff, I decided to get into a legitimate business. I noticed that many kids in my school were fixing up their cars with after market parts, so I decided to get into reselling automotive parts. I picked up a resellers permit from the State Board of Equalization, which allowed me to buy car parts at a discount and sell them to other students.

The Corporate Life
Because my income from my businesses was not stable, I decide to get a “real” job. I was only 15 and the only local place I could pick up a job was at Knott’s Berry Farm, in the park services department. The department I worked in sounded cool, but I was in charge of picking up trash, emptying trashcans, cleaning restrooms, and sweeping up vomit. Although the job sounded bad, I loved it because I got paid a few cents more per hour for cleaning the restrooms compared to most of the jobs at Knott’s Berry Farm.

After 3 months of working at Knott’s, I quit and picked up a job at Quality Systems. This job didn’t give me any steady income, but the job paid out a few hundred dollars in commission per sale. I was selling a $1600 Kirby vacuum. I went door to door and tried to convince homeowners to let me clean their carpets for free and I would then sell them on the vacuum after shampooing their carpet. After doing this for a month or so shockingly I sold a vacuum to an Indian couple (I was surprised because generally Indians are cheap). But after a week reality kicked in and they returned the vacuum.

Realizing that the average American could not afford to buy a $1600 vacuum, I decided to look for other career opportunities. My sister was working for an Oracle consultant locally and she introduced me to him. I found out that as an Oracle consultant, my sister’s boss was billing companies 125 to 250 dollars an hour. I was shocked to hear how much he was making, which lead the entrepreneur within me to come out once again. I tried to figure out how I could also make that much as a high school student, so I turned to Monster.com and started looking for Oracle consulting jobs. The problem was, I had no clue what Oracle was.

.COM boom
Instead of finding a job on Monster.com I learned about Monster.com’s business model and how they were making hundreds of millions of dollars. As a kid, I thought that if I could even make 1% of what they did, I would be rich. This lead me to start my own job board called Advice Monkey. After spending 5 grand to build the job board, I launched it and learned that you have to market a site for it to be successful.

Knowing that I needed some help with marketing, I hired an Internet marketing firm. Within a few months I learned they were taking my money and doing nothing valuable in exchange, so I fired them. I then hired two more firms who also provided little to no results.

Since I was broke because a few Internet marketers took all my money, I decided to learn Internet marketing myself and within a few months I became pretty good at it. Advice Monkey started to become popular, but it never succeeded because the site was not setup to take credit card transactions.

A New Life
My sister was still working for the Oracle consultant and she kept telling me how he was making a lot of money. I then decided that I was going to take that career path and open up my Oracle consulting company. But I had a major roadblock in my way, I was nowhere near 18 years old and I didn’t have a college degree.

With my sisters help I started taking general education college courses at Cypress Community College while in high school. My goal by doing this was to finish college in 2.5 years.

My first college class was Speech 101, in which I had to give three speeches on any topic of my choice. One of the speeches I gave was how search engines work. After giving the speech one of the individuals in the class asked me if I wanted to consult Elpac Electronics on their Internet marketing strategy. Using my sales skills that I learned from selling vacuums door to door, I was able to lock them into a $3500 a month consulting gig. Realizing that I could make a lot of money and change my lifestyle by doing Internet marketing for companies, I decided to start up an Internet marketing company with my sister’s boyfriend (now her husband).

The Good Life
The Internet marketing company started taking off and as a kid I thought I was “rolling in dough”. With the money I made I started investing in a few other companies. I invested around a million dollars into a hosting company called Vision Web Hosting, that never worked out (sadly I lost all of the money I invested into it). After realizing investing wasn’t for me, my business partner and I took the rest of the money we made and created another company called Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg created a lot of buzz when it came out and I surely thought I would end up selling it for 10 million dollars. When I wasn’t able to get an asking price of 10 million dollars for Crazy Egg my business partner and I decided that we were going to raise venture capital because Crazy Egg wasn’t a profitable company.

After pitching Crazy Egg to venture capitalists for 6 months, I realized no one was going to invest in it. Because of this I had no choice other than to figure out how to make Crazy Egg profitable.

Today
This now brings me up to date. Other than the Internet marketing company I also co-founded a few more companies such as KISSmetrics, which funny enough got funded by True Ventures who I once pitched Crazy Egg to. Some of the companies I co-founded didn’t do well and made me lose a lot of money whereas others have done great. But after 23 years of living I have learned one really important thing: life isn’t fair! If you don’t like the cards you are dealt with, do something to change them. And for some ungodly reason, if you are unable to change them, keep moving forward and don’t look back. All you can do is try.

The Future
I wish I had a crystal ball that could tell me what the future holds for me, but I don’t have one. Luckily enough, I have made more money than I have lost and I have been able to leverage that money into invests like hotels, houses, .com companies, the stock market, venture capital funds, and best of all my parents. Hopefully my investments will pay off so that I can continue to do what I am doing and not work for anyone else.

Over the next few years my number 1 goal is to share what I have learned with you so that you can have a better life than me. If you have any questions or need any help with anything, please DON’T be shy to ask.