Neil Patel – the analytics expert, entrepreneur and a top influencer on the Web

Neil Patel

Full Name: Neil Patel

Date Of Birth: April 24, 1985

Place: La Palma, California

Profession: Entrepreneur

Education: Kennedy High,California State University, Fullerton

Website: www.neilpatel.com

Facebook Profile: https://www.facebook.com/neilkpatel

Twitter: https://twitter.com/neilpatel

Neil Patel is the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics. He helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and Viacom grow their revenue. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 online marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies in the world. He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 35 by the United Nations. Neil has also been awarded Congressional Recognition from the United States House of Representatives.

Where it all started?

Neil Patel was surrounded by entrepreneurs since his childhood, which led him to start Advice Monkey – his first job board at the age of 15. But when all the marketing companies Patel hired for the project failed to gain the company any traction, he decided to learn how to drive traffic to his site, and hence Patel launched his career in online marketing.

Realizing that He could make a lot of money and change his lifestyle by doing Internet marketing for companies, Patel decided to start up an Internet marketing company with his sister’s boyfriend (now her husband), Hiten Shah.

He invested around a million dollars into a hosting company called Vision Web Hosting which never worked out. Sadly, Patel lost all of the money he had invested into it. After realizing investing wasn’t for them, they both took the rest of the money they had and created another company called Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg created a lot of buzz when it came out, and Patel thought that he would end up selling Crazy Egg for ten million dollars, as they were getting so much interest from Fortune 1,000 companies.

When they weren’t able to get an asking price of ten million dollars for Crazy Egg, Patel and Hiten decided that they were going to raise venture capital because Crazy Egg wasn’t a profitable company.

After pitching Crazy Egg to venture capitalists for six months, they realized no one was going to invest in it. Because of this, Patel and Hiten had no choice but to figure out how to make Crazy Egg profitable.

Patel was attending college during this time as a full time student while working 60+ hours a week. To top it off, Patel was traveling almost every week and speaking at over 50 conferences a year by this point.

Luckily enough, Crazy Egg started to do well financially, and they quickly learned how lucrative software companies could be due to the recurring income, they decided to get back into creating more software companies.

But unlike Crazy Egg, the newer software ventures didn’t seem to work out. Eventually, we learned that Crazy Egg succeeded while the other software companies didn’t because of two reasons: not only does it solve a unique problem that enough businesses are experiencing, but it does so in a very simple way. With this new found knowledge, they decided to create another analytics company that would solve a much larger problem than what Crazy Egg solved. Crazy Egg was doing well, but it was never going to be that billion dollar company because the market size for that one product is very limited.

The product that Patel and his partner happened to come up with was KISSmetrics. Funny enough, they were able to get funding for it through True Ventures to whom Patel once pitched Crazy Egg and who decided not to fund that company.

Over the last few years, KISSmetrics has been growing. Patel and his team had released a few more software products under that brand. Patel also raised a bit more venture capital from a few other venture firms and a few prominent angel investors in Silicon Valley.

Ventures co-founded by Neil Patel

Quick Sprout

Patel launched Quick Sprout in 2006 initially as a personal project. Afterwards, Quick Sprout grew to produce annual revenues in excess of US$1 million and was featured in major news outlets, including Inc. Magazine, Forbes, Gigaom, and Business Insider. By 2009, Patel had implemented his marketing and search engine optimization tactics on 30 of the top 100 Technorati blogs.

URL: https://www.quicksprout.com

KISSmetrics

The mission of KISSmetrics is to give all online businesses (big and small) the tools and technology to measure what’s happening and tune their user’s experience.

KISSmetrics is a company run by a team of designers, developers and entrepreneurs that are passionate about helping online businesses measure, grow and monetize. The team’s experience comes from previous ventures including ACS, Crazy Egg and Product Planner. As a result, the team has hands-on experience understanding and developing analytics solutions for high-end web properties. KISSmetrics is backed by well respected private and institutional investors including True Ventures, SoftTech VC, Felicis Ventures, Dave McClure, Shervin Pishevar and Bobby Yazdani.

URL: http://kissmetrics.com

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/KISSmetrics

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Kissmetrics

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kissmetrics

SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/kissmetrics

Crazy Egg Hello Bar

Apart these, Neil Patel also co-founded some digital marketing companies like Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg provides different marketing tools for analytics, visualizations, heatmaps etc. In 2012, Crazy egg purchased Hello Bar, which is a notification bar that draws web users to an important call to action on your website.

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