7 revelations of Neil Patel: how to avoid mistakes of 100 million, how not to “fly” a startup and what is the ROI of a helicopter

By the age of 30, this man had done 4 web analytics projects and an increase in online sales with an annual turnover in excess of $ 150 million and 300,000 users worldwide. He invests tens of thousands of personal funds in startups, speaks at conferences and gives out a ton of valuable content on a personal blog. In this case, according to his confession, he made a bunch of mistakes that cost him 100 million.

Who is this person? We are talking about Nile Patel, a famous marketer and techno-entrepreneur, founder of the services QuickSprout, Kissmetrics, CrazyEgg and Hello Bar.
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In this article, we translated his interview , where Neil talks about what businesses are 100% failing, where to find time for 8 blog posts every week, how not to mess with content marketing, how to avoid SaaS business competition and what does ROI helicopter.


His first business - online bulletin board - Neil opened in 15 years. He says: “To be honest, I just wanted to get rich. And I don’t know of any other way to do this, except to open my own business. ”
Now Neil willingly shares his experience, tells him where he started, what mistakes he encountered, how he corrected them.

Why the first business failed

So, Neal did not know other ways to become rich, except to start a business. At the age of 15, “being rich” meant earning at least $ 100,000 a year.
For these purposes, he opens Advice Monkey - an online bulletin board. A rather mediocre service that six months later "went to the bottom." So Neil got his first painful lesson: if you start a business just to make money, you will burn.

Money is not enough motivation. You have to find something that will entice you. What will solve the real problems of people.

That project was CrazyEgg.

How a startup grows even faster

Crazy Egg is a visual analytics tool that tracks clicks and scrolling of site visitors. Only in 2014, he scored more than 100,000 users. But, as Neil is sure, there could have been even more if not for one serious puncture:

We killed freemium too soon. A huge mistake. After all, free users can eventually go into the category of paid. But most importantly, they can bring you even more new customers.

The fact is that at the very beginning the service had a free tariff. The developers decided to remove it in order to increase monetization. In fact, the effect was the opposite: the growth rate of users fell 5 times. The same applies to another project - Kissmetrics, where the Free trial plan was subsequently introduced. “If we did this from the very beginning, now the company would cost 200 million more.” Neil emphasizes that in the SaaS business, the freemium model is the foundation of development. Just need to optimize the conversion correctly.

How an entrepreneur can do business and write a blog

Neil works in parallel with several companies, and also deals with investments and advises start-ups. And between this - he writes to the blog, up to 8 posts per week.
How does he do it? Indeed, many entrepreneurs complain that they do not have time for such things.

It's all nonsense. You do not have time for a blog, but you have time to lie on the sofa in front of the TV for three hours? Or "relax" in a bar with friends?

Neil is obsessed with time management, uses applications like RescueTime, which track time costs and help focus on the most important tasks:



In addition, he cultivates good habits:

I get up early. I think this is very important. I try to do some important things in the morning. It helps a lot. If you have affairs that need to be done, but you don’t really want to - do not postpone them until the evening.

How not to mess with content marketing?

Neil's second business, opened jointly with Khiten Khan, is KISSmetrics analytics service. Surely you met their famous slogan: "Google Analytics shows you what's going on, KISSmetrics shows who does it." This is one of the first SaaS-companies, which was promoted through content marketing. The KISSmetrics blog post contains some of the coolest articles on marketing and conversion optimization.



This was not always the case. Because the blog has been optimized to drive traffic, but not quite targeted.

We taught people SEO, taught how to optimize your blog. With that, our paying customers are not bloggers, but online stores and SaaS companies. Do not repeat our mistakes. Prepare content for the most solvent part of your audience.

Appreciate those who are hungry

Neil is a big fan of learning from mistakes - own and others.

Never neglect those who do not have such resources as you, but who are truly hungry. Many have underestimated Google - fu, some sort of search engine, a small company, blah blah blah. What will these people say now?

“Although the business has changed a lot in the Internet era, its basic principles remain the same. For example, competition. Once a guy came up to me, who said that he was going to make his service and would compete with one of my projects. I answered him - OK, try.
And he really tried! He had no command, no money, there was only a program code slyannyh on his knee - but he really did his service, he had clients. I would advise you not to discount such guys. Often they are the ones who can seriously help or hinder you. ”

How to get away from the competition

Many companies are focused on revenue optimization. Well, revenue is good. At the same time for SaaS, everything is decided by the coverage and distribution of the product. As an example, another Nile project - Hello Bar.



“Expand your user base, and add revenues. The easiest and at the same time effective reception is at the Hello Bar (pop-up panel creation tool). Right on the panel with the message there is always the inscription "Powered by Hello Bar" ("Made with Hello Bar") or a link to our website. That is, if you saw such a panel on someone on the site and decided to try something like this, you know what to look for. ”

Another example is Quick Sprout, content marketing software.

Neil says: “I could sell it in a standard way. But we are making a blog for this project in which we tell people about content marketing, new techniques, cases, trends. The more people who understand this topic - the more we will have customers.
Every time I create an infographic, I add short descriptions at the end, in which I indicate the sources of information, and also tell about what I sell. Thanks to these annotations, readers associate infographics with my product. It helps to attract new customers in the long run. ”



If you give people valuable knowledge, even if it is not acquired by you, they will begin to see in you an expert, a leader. And this status will have a good service when customers choose between you and competitors.

Helicopter roi

Neil Patel is known not only for SaaS projects, but also for extraordinary experiments.
For example, he recently rented a helicopter that changed his business.

Driving a car is stressful, I constantly get into minor accidents. And sometimes the trip from point A to point B can take two and a half hours due to traffic jams. By helicopter, I get to the right place in 15 minutes. Given the time saved, it is more profitable for me to use a helicopter than a Mercedes.

The helicopter helped Neal not only save time. He influenced his entire business - offers from new partners fell down, they saw status business in him.

Neal himself is amused:

“My mother was a teacher, and she always had problems with finances. But does this mean that she was not successful? No, in my eyes she was much more successful than me, because she influenced the lives of so many people. But people associate success with material goods, especially in the USA. Here you can make even more money if you show your wealth. ”

The idea of ​​a million from Neil Patel

At the end of the interview, Neal was asked to name a business idea that could bring millions of dollars to someone who could adequately implement it. He did not hesitate for a second.

“E-mail.

There are many email applications, but they are not suitable for people who receive many emails. For example, I receive up to 400 emails per day. And for the processing of such a flow of messages, they did not think of anything better than using standard Gmail filters, or have a secretary.
However, much of what I get by e-mail, I can not trust the assistants. I can forward part of the letters to them, but I cannot give the login from the mail.

Now, if someone came up with a program that determines how important a message is, and if you didn’t respond to this letter earlier. In general, if an application appears that really helps people spend less time analyzing email, it will become super-successful! ”

Commentary by the head of Yagla.ru Alexander Alimov

Neil Patel's principles are somehow close to any Internet project. The Yagla dynamic content service is also promoted through content marketing: we run a corporate blog on the site and a blog on Megamind with materials on online sales and conversion enhancement. For example, in this article we show how to contextually monetize requests that do not make a profit in contextual advertising.