How Neil Patel Became a Successful Serial Internet Entrepreneur

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Jay: Neil, welcome to the show.

Neil: Thank you for having me.

Jay: So, first of all, I read something that was in an interview somewhere, I don’t know where, but I wrote it down in my notes here that you had an opportunity to sell your last company, “Crazy Egg, ” for six million dollars, when you were only making about $20,000 a month, but you declined because you wanted ten million dollars. Was that one of the biggest mistakes you’ve ever made?

Neil: Yes.

Jay: Did you have investors in that company?

Neil: No.

Jay: Oh my God. Yes, it would have been a nice payday. It was just you and a co-founder?

Neil: I have another co-founder, but luckily now it’s worth more than that.

Jay: Yes, but liquidity is one thing versus being worth something. That would have been nice to get.

Neil: Well, if you take profit, and you multiply it by three or four or whatever, maybe it’s worth more. But if you take all the years it took to get there, right, it would have been wiser to just take the six million dollar check, and move on to the next thing.

Jay: Yes, yes. Exactly. So you’re talking about the multiple of the revenue that you earned anyway, over the time, what you could have gotten, it was a time value, the money I guess in some ways, and you could have had that earlier. But it all worked out pretty well for you in the end anyway. Sometimes it doesn’t for people. So advice to everybody else would be “take the money when you can,” right?

Neil: Take the money when you can when it makes sense. It made sense at that point because like we’re doing $20,000 a month, [??] six million bucks. Especially – -

Jay: The multiple was off the charts, right?

Neil: That’s right. So it’s like, it would be stupid not to take the money. Now, it’s right for us, like it worked out that we didn’t, so, but it was really stupid and we made a few more mistakes like that, right? We had another opportunity with a podcast advertising company that could have bought [??] bought that out when podcasts was really big, right, and as it’s blowing up in the day, and I was out there on a lot of those sites. So, made a ton of mistakes and learned over time.

Jay: So, in this interview, I want to just kind of walk through your background, and wanted to understand why you got into online marketing and, you know, bring me through that transition. On your “about” page on your website you kind of talk about it, but I just want to have a conversation with you about it. What made you get into becoming an entrepreneur?

Neil: Sure. What made me become an entrepreneur was I couldn’t find a job [laughs], right? So I tried finding a job, couldn’t find one, I started up my first website, I didn’t know how to get traffic to it, it wasn’t making any money, I didn’t really have much more money to pay other people – I paid a few marketers a little money to help me out – but it didn’t work out, and I had to learn how to do it on my own. Got good at it over time, and then started becoming an online marketer and offering services, because I just knew how to get traffic. I didn’t necessarily know how to make money from my website, but I knew how to get traffic, at least get qualified visitors and traffic to a website.

Jay: Is that, well I guess that’s not necessarily true today, but how long did it take you to start figuring out how to actually make money when you knew how to get the traffic?

Neil: From my first website, it probably took me two years.

Jay: OK. And what years are we talking? What was the time frame at that time?

Neil: 17 to 18.

Jay: Oh, I’m sorry. What was the year, was it? I’m sorry.

Neil: What year was it? It was late 1990s.

Jay: OK. So you did this early on. You were in high school when you started.

Neil: Yes, I was in high school. So from 16, I wasn’t making any money. 17, I started making money, wasn’t from the website though, and then 18, I actually started closing customers from the website. The money I made between 16 and 18 was from word of mouth and had nothing to do with the website.

Jay: I have a cousin, he’s actually an orthopedic surgeon now, but one of his summer jobs, when he was an undergrad, was selling Kirby vacuums. And I saw you did the same thing. He got the family members to buy it, is what he basically did [laughs]. My mom, grandparents, right?

Neil: That’s what a lot of people do. But the issue I run into is my family members are all Indian, right, and they’re kind of stingy, so it’s like it just doesn’t work out. They were like “why would I buy them from you,” right? And then I’m like, “oh, but I’m your son, and this vacuum’s great,” and they’re like “I don’t give a shit,” right, they’re just like “$1,600 bucks? Like, we don’t need a $1,600 dollar vacuum.”

Jay: Yes, that’s crazy. $1,600 dollars? One of the things he did to try to close a deal, is he would take the vacuum and put it on their bed, on their mattress, and suck out the bedbugs, [laugh] and show them. Show them what their vacuum was doing. Now imagine, that’s your bed, by the way, you might want to get a new bed as well as buying a Kirby, but this is what it’s not doing, show you this on the carpet, it’s not doing this. So it’s funny that you did that. I haven’t met many people that sold a Kirby vacuum before.

Neil: It taught me how to sell, like, it gave me the confidence to cold call people, and start closing deals. Because I would have to go door-to-door, knock on doors, until I would get meetings to clean people’s house for free, and then I was hoping they’d end up buying. But most people just wanted their house cleaned for free because I’d vacuum and shampoo, right? So it was like what for free, ‘cuz [??] right? So, what do they have to lose?

Jay: Yeah. Yeah, for him it validated him being a doctor. I don’t want to sell. I love this. I learned it empowers me. I know how to sell, and he’s like, I’m definitely going to stick with the doctor thing. So the .com boom happens at some point in the 90s when you’re doing this. Is that kind of you saw the .coms happening and you’re like, I got to get in on it?

Neil: That was part of it. The other part of it was I was on Monster.com. They went public, and I saw how big they were, and I’m like, Wow! Dot com companies make a s**t load of cash. I got to be a part of this. I want to be there. So my first website actually was a job board. And I copied Monster.com because I’m like, wait, they make hundreds and millions of bucks. I can make at least one percent of those even if my site’s not popular. But, it doesn’t work that way.

Jay: From that point, what was the first website that you actually tried to launch and get the visitors to? What was your first website?

Neil: It was called Advice Monkey.com. It was supposed to be a job board. It’s no longer up. I don’t own it. I think I let the domain expire and someone else ended up taking it up. But, that was my first website. And it didn’t make a dollar.

Jay: Did it have a subscription? Did you have anything with PayPal at that time? Did that exist?

Neil: I had a subscription thing, but I didn’t have any place where they could pay for it.

Jay: So the business model on paper was we’re going to have this subscription model, but you couldn’t figure out how to do that, they had to send you a check?

Neil: That’s correct. And who is going to send checks, right? And at that time PayPal and other service providers weren’t popular. And there were a lot of strict requirements to actually do credit card processing online.

Jay: Yeah, I remember those days. It was really difficult. There were the PayPals of the world, but even PayPal had a choppy-ish kind of reputation at the time. You saw the eBay Power Sellers and stuff, they would hold their money if there as a dispute. People just pulled money out right away all the time.

Neil: Yep. And you actually on some providers you had to blood tests to get a merchant account, and stuff like that. I don’t know why they made you do that.

Jay: A blood test? Really?

Neil: Yeah, I was looking online when I was a kid and, ‘Oh, you want a merchant account. We’re going to require you take a blood test.’ And I thought, why the hell would I do it? A blood test. It didn’t make sense. Maybe it was like a scam or something.

Jay: And you said one of your early inspirations was your sister’s boyfriend, now husband, was a consultant, and he inspired you to do what?

Neil: Actually her boss at the time, was a consultant to Oracle Financial, and he was going to come to Ralph’s Supermarket, or Bonds or Staples, Costco, and figure out what’s making them money on the shelves and what’s not, and then to order stuff to maximize profit and revenue. That was his job, [??] and was charging a few hundred bucks an hour and had like big contracts for six months and stuff like that.

Jay: And that kind of inspired you to be a consultant yourself?

Neil: That’s what inspired me to start my own business, ‘cuz I went to Monster.com to find Oracle Financial Consulting job. And at sixteen, it wasn’t the right bit. I didn’t know what Oracle Financial Consulting was at the time, and I didn’t have a degree, and most of these companies wanted college degrees, they wanted experience. So I didn’t meet any of the requirements to do well as a financial consultant.

Jay: So, did you ever go to college?

Neil: I did. I ended up graduating. It took me five and half years.

Jay: Because you were running a company at the same time?

Neil: That’s correct.

Jay: Okay. So, what happened after the Monkey [??]? What happened after that?

Neil: It was A.C.S., which is an Internet marketing company. And I just kept on cranking on that for awhile, and realized that consulting [??] makes good money, but it’s not one of those skill businesses. So, from there we figured out the problems the clients were facing, and we started developing software companies to solve those problems and started transitioning, right? So, instead of doing consulting we started doing more software stuff, which is how Crazy Eggs was born; how Kiss Metrics was born, etc.

Jay: Explain Crazy Eggs. What was the idea for Crazy Egg at the time?

Neil: At that time people were using Google on Linux and [??], and I’m like, we got all this data, but we don’t get what it means. Is there a way we can help visualize this data for companies? So instead of showing you ones and zeros, we show you how people engage with your website in a visual format, so then you can go out there and make website changes based on what you see visually; like, if people click on this specific area a lot it shows hot spots and if they don’t it shows cold spots.

Jay: Right.

Neil: So that says I want more people to click here, so let’s just move it around, right? Or a lot of people are clicking here, and it’s a lot of links, so let’s make it a link. It helps you make your website more useable so that way you can make more money from your site.

Jay: So that business was a subscription business, it was a SaaS essentially, right?

Neil: That’s right.

Jay: And what year was that?

Neil: Early 2000s, or mid-2000s, my guess is 2005, 2006?

Jay: I guess they were calling them SaaS’s at that time, but today it’s all the rage, everybody’s talking about it, and Angel listing it, the SaaS is the new social networking.

Neil: That’s right.

Jay: On your blog you say at that time, I guess this is the marking company you’re talking about, that was talking off as a kid, and you were rolling in the dough. Is that right? You invested a million dollars in some other business that burned it all up. It just didn’t work out?

Neil: Yes, I tried doing a hosting company, that took away most of that money, that one failed miserably. Yes, wasted a lot of money on stupid ideas and investing in bad people.

Jay: Can you get into that a little bit more, the vision web hosting and what happened there

Neil: Sure. The concept was the same concept Media Temple has right now, with their grid search, in which you combine a ton of servers, so that when people on Digg and all these social sites, there’s no fraction, it’s a shared environment, but a really big shared environment.

We ended up trying to do that, invested in some people in Texas, and they kept on having excuses, like, ‘Oh, we’re getting evicted from the house,’ and we had to put them in the house instead of using a co-lo, which is really stupid. We had to pay for the house, they told us, ‘Hey let’s put in a DS3 or P3 live,’ I forget what they were called at the time, ‘into the home.’

They made us do all this stuff that wasn’t the wisest things, which started adding up, paying their salaries from all that kind of stuff, sooner or later we were into it for close to a million bucks over a two year period.

Jay: Oh my god! You were taking the money from Crazy Egg, were you directly investing the money out of the entity, Crazy Egg into those, so you didn’t have to pay tax on it?

Neil: No, legally you can’t do that, and it wasn’t even from Crazy, because Crazy wasn’t making money at the time, or it was making money, but it was losing money.

Jay: How were you making so much money? What were you doing that brought in all that money?

Neil: When you pay yourself as a hard salary, and you have all that income, it’s like, what do you do with it? So, we would invest it.

Jay: I meant what was bringing in the money? It wasn’t Crazy Egg?

Neil: It was the consulting company, the internet marketing agency.

Jay: I see. OK. So Crazy Egg wasn’t pulling in the money but the consulting that you were doing was.

Neil: That’s right.

Jay: How much money did you make doing consulting? What would haul in?

Neil: A good amount. But we had six figure clients; some clients were even in the seven figure range.

Jay: Wow. And there’s no cost, it’s your time, right?

Neil: There was cost on it, but our margins were high.

Jay: Wow, that’s great. Unfortunate that you spent money on the hosting company, but that was just one of your bad bets, and it says here that you also have done some good investments, too, right? So it’s not that it was all bad. You did some real estate.

Neil: Yes. Crazy Egg made up for all the losses, plus more, right? So it ended working out. All you need is one win to make up for everything else.

Jay: Yes, so explain how Crazy Egg, how you turned it around. It wasn’t doing very well at the beginning, but then it turned around?

Neil: It was just a time game. So, we had a free product, and then we up saled you into paid. It was free and just made everyone pay and that’s what changes everything around for us. In thirty days after doing that, our revenue doubled.

Jay: Wow, so you gave away the product essentially for free, it’s almost like a free trial. Did you tell them it was a trial, or was it just free at first?

Neil: Before, we used to just give it away for free, and then up sale you into a higher plans/

Jay: Right.

Neil: That never worked for us, we did it wrong, though. Now we just say, ‘Hey, you want to use it, you’ve got to pay from day one,’ which makes us a lot more money.

Jay: What is the minimum they have to pay to pull out a credit card?

Neil: Nine bucks a month.

Jay: And you do that so that so they get used to the behavior of using a credit card and paying you, right?

Neil: That’s correct. And we also up sale them from there.

Jay: Interesting. Because otherwise they’re always going to want something for nothing, essentially, right?

Neil: Yes, free works, you just have to do it right. Drop Box is a great example of a free model that knows how to up sale. We know how to do it now; it’s just so many years after. If we knew what we know now, back then, we would have done much better.

Jay: So, Crazy Egg leads you to KISSmetrics, in some way. How does that happen?

Neil: Crazy Egg was not that 100 million dollar analytics company. KISSmetrics is Crazy Egg 2.0. We tried raising money off Crazy Egg 2.0, no one funded us. Then they liked the concept of funding KISSmetrics, a new company, a new entity. It’s a much bigger vision, something that we can do to [sounds like] Gropter Omniture. It could potentially become a billion dollar company. Will it get there? Who knows that? But we’re shooting for it.

Jay: It’s interesting, though. Because, you’re making the money with Crazy Egg. What made you say, “I want to go into this VC-backed industry, business where I eventually maybe sell it and then I’ll make my money?” Because along the way, in a VC-backed company, you don’t make a lot of money, right?

Neil: You can, or you don’t. It’s hit or miss, but…

Jay: Explain that.

Neil: If you raise, let’s say 10 million bucks, the VC’s, let’s say, own 80% of the company, including options, so let’s say 70%, the employees own 10%, and you have two cofounders. That means that each cofounder owns 10%, to make the numbers really simple.

You sell for 100 million bucks, the VCs more than get their money back. They only put in 10 million bucks in your company. As a founder, you can make 10 million bucks, which is still a lot of cash.

Jay: But I’m saying, along the ride, it’s all on the exit, right? When you raise money.

Neil: That’s right. If you raise a lot of money, you can get a decent salary of, like, 100 grand a year, 120. But you’re not going to make as much as compared to if you worked for a Microsoft or a Facebook.

Jay: Right. Or, if you are running a Crazy Egg and it’s a cash cow, right? Like if James Hahn [??], and him and Jim made lots of money with [?? and??}, and they always deferred. Like, "Why would we raise the money from the VCs? We're getting our exit every year". 5 millions bucks a year, or so.

Neil: That's right. They're making over a million dollar salary after taxes.

Jay: What's that?

Neil: At that point, they're making over a million bucks a year after taxes, right? With multiple co-founders, taxes and expenses. But it works out that way.

Jay: Exactly. So there's certain times when it makes sense to go for it, and other times when it doesn't. My point is, it felt like, with Crazy Egg, at least from the story you tell me, it sounds like you guys were in a situation like Jim and James, from [??]. You’re kind of bankrolling as you’re going.

Neil: Not when we raised money for KISSmetrics.

Jay: Oh, I see.

Neil: It makes money now but, that’s three years out when we raise money. Like, it’s doing well, but it took us a very long time to get to where we are today.

Jay: And so that brings us to another point. You have two businesses, one in which you pitched the VCs, the same VCs, mind you, right? And they said no. And they said yes to the other company. And now they’re like, “I want that one too”. They probably would love to be in both, but.. (?) … We’ll just stick with KISSmetrics.

Neil: That doesn’t make sense for us because Crazy Egg does so well and we don’t want, it has it’s own team, so…

Jay: You’re just a silent owner at this point.

Neil: Yeah, and it just grows every month, so we decided to continue operating as is.

Jay: That’s great. And how did you implement people in that business, to run that business? You had to bring in, I guess a CEO to operate it. Did you give him equity?

Neil: It’s actually, my sister is running it, and operating…

Jay: Oh wow!

Neil: And that’s my business partner’s wife.

Jay: You can’t beat that. My partner in my business is my wife, actually.

Neil: Nice.

Jay: Yeah. So that’s great. So tell me a little more about KISSmetrics, where you’re at right now in terms of your growth. So you started the company when?

Neil: I would say, 2007? 6? Somewhere around there. I don’t know the exact year. I should. I’m really bad at years.

But yes, so the first few years, we focused more on the software, now we’re focusing more on [??], and we’re focusing a large portion of time on iterating the software, as well as [pinking up?] inside sales and just growing the company from a revenue aspect.

Jay: Have you grown its profitability already?

Neil: Ah, no. And we’re just continually trying to grow the sales team, and grow the revenue, versus trying to get to profitability.

Jay: Okay. What’s your lifestyle like now, in terms of your daily life? Being a cofounder of KISSmetrics, a venture-backed company. Do you have to go into the office every single day? What do you do?

Neil: I live in Seattle. The office is actually in San Francisco, California, or somewhere in San Francisco. I don’t go into the office at all. I just chill out in my condo and work.

Jay: And the VCs don’t seem to mind, right? It doesn’t make a difference.

Neil: Nah. They don’t care.

Jay: What kind of… if you don’t mind… what kind of salary do you bring in? You said like, if you raise a lot, you can bring in over a hundred. Are you guys under, sub-one hundred? Or it’s all about the equity for you?

Neil: It is. For me and my cofounder, we really don’t take a high salary. At one point, we didn’t take any salary, even though we raised four million bucks. But then, they were like, “Hey you guys should take something”. So I think our salary is… it shouldn’t be more than, I’m guessing five grand a month.

Jay: 60 grand a year, something like that.

Neil: 60 grand a year. After taxes it’s not much. It doesn’t pay for my cost of living. I could take more, but I’m all about the equity.

Jay: Right. You already have something else making you money, right? So, it’s like, let me reinvest that money hiring other talents and we grow the business.

Neil: That’s right. Personally, I don’t even care for that 60 grand a year, right? It makes no difference if I get it or if I don’t.

Jay: So what’s next for you guys? You raised 4 millions dollars, you’re not profitable on that business, but it’s growing. How many customers do you have?

Neil: Thousands. I don’t know the exact count, but it’s in the thousands. So we’re going to continue to grow, some growing it, and then we’ll probably raise another round sometime in 2012.

Jay: You’ll raise more money then next year?

Neil: Yes.

Jay: Okay. How many folks are working there?

Neil: I think, 20.

Jay: You don’t know any numbers.

Neil: I don’t know any numbers. (inaudible} head count every month.

Jay: It turns on and off. Yeah right.

Neil: I can tell you how many people are in sales and stuff, but my department is pretty much sales. Anything that’s related towards revenue, that’s my job as a co-founder. Anything…

Jay: Right. Can you talk about that? How much it’s doing?

Neil: We do not talk about revenue.

Jay: So you can’t tell me that. The one thing you can tell me you can’t tell me. [laughter]

Neil: That’s right.

Jay: I figured you can’t. If it’s that VC backed kind of company, you usually can’t say.

Neil: I know my revenue by heart literally to the dollar for the last six months.

Jay: And it’s just growing month over month? Is it a recurring business too, I guess? Right?

Neil: It is, yes. It’s been growing month over month.

Jay: Okay. And one of your investors is True Ventures.

Neil: Yes.

Jay: O’Mallack’s at True Ventures, right?

Neil: Yes. Om’s awesome. Gig Om. I love him.

Jay: Gig Ohm. Yes. So who is the person that leads your investment there>

Neil: Tony Conrad.

Jay: Okay.

Neil: [inaudible] about me. The cool part about Tony, like Om as well, he’s an entrepreneur. It’s cool to have an entrepreneur on your board. I know he’s a VC as well. He has a lot of experience when it comes to fund raising and how to run a venture-backed business. I love the fact that he’s an entrepreneur because instead of saying “Oh go do this, go do that” he’s done it. He’s [inaudible] able to I think AOL and he just talked to me about AOL. He actually knows how to grow businesses and grow revenue.

I don’t know if he had revenue but Sphere was a revenue-based business. It was ad related as well, and their banking on it. So [inaudible] “Go do this for sales, go do this to grow your [inaudible]. You need PR. If you don’t get PR you’re not going to get x amount of leads. Or PR makes fund raising easy.” He has a ton of feedback from his own experiences, which is awesome.

Jay: What would you say is the most remarkable milestone you’ve had in your career to date?

Neil: Sure. The most remarkable milestone would be…that’s actually a tough one. Huh. That’s such a good question. I would say the most remarkable milestone is not having to worry about money.

Jay: Yes.

Neil: I know that may sound weird. It’s not like I’m rich or anything like that. I just don’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.

Jay: Right.

Neil: Or putting food on the table or anything like that. I don’t have to work for anyone else for the rest of my life, right.

Jay: It’s very liberating, right, to get to that point?

Neil: Yes. Kind of. But at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter. After you’re there, what’s left? Making more money, right? You’re still technically working for someone because the moment you take investor’s money or if you have a lot of customers, you’re working for someone. Your customers are your bosses.

Jay: Yes.

Neil: I would say it’s actually more stressful than 9-5. I wouldn’t say it’s a great accomplishment for not having to work for someone but it’s nice knowing that you don’t have to worry about your mortgage payment next month or next year or anything like that.

Jay: Right. It affords you the ability as an entrepreneur to focus on whatever it is you’re trying to build, right? You don’t have to…

Neil: Exactly. You got it. That’s really important because all that side stuff are distractions. If you have to worry about putting food on the table, it’s really hard to be an entrepreneur, right? If you can’t feed the kids, trust me, you’re not going to be an entrepreneur for long because you’re just going to go get a 9-5 job to feed the family.

Jay: Or you’ll be divorced. [laughter].

Neil: That’s right.

Jay: You’ll choose whatever your priority is at some point [laughter].

Neil: Yes.

Jay: No, that’s a good point. If you could give one piece of advice to budding entrepreneurs out there, what would that one piece of advice be?

Neil: Learn from your mistakes. Not enough of them do that. If you can learn from your mistakes and not repeat them, you’re going to succeed. It’s just a question of when. If you really want to take it to the next level, learn from other people’s mistakes.

Jay: What would be your biggest mistake?

Neil: My biggest mistake is not moving quick enough.

Jay: Not moving fast enough with your business and pivoting direction when you should?

Neil: That’s right. We took too long to pivot in Kiss Metrics. We didn’t move fast enough when we first started. We’re moving really fast right now. But if we had moved this fast when we first started? Oh boy, we would be probably five to ten times larger.

Jay: Who is the greatest influence to you? Other entrepreneurs I’m speaking about, who is your greatest influence out there?

Neil: Elon Musk.

Jay: Interesting. Do you follow what he has done or do you follow what he’s written? Like PayPal and stuff, it’s just the companies that he’s done? Why is he such an inspiration?

Neil: Yeah, probably what he’s done. He’s a really smart guy. The guy has balls too, right? Couldn’t get money for his own business, he put up close to $100 million of his own money, which is pretty much most of it, to start another company.

Jay: That’s unbelievable.

Neil: The guy’s a bad ass. People say you can’t do two companies at once. He’s got Tesla, which is doing well, and Space Eggs. He’s the CEO of both of them, right? And one’s a publicly traded company, right? You’d think there would be scrutiny but he still pulls it off. He doesn’t really do much angel investing. He’s just like screw it, I only do big ideas. If you look at what he’s invested in I think there’s one, like Solar City, or one of these solar companies. It’s like anything he does turns into gold. Or anything he touches, right?

Jay: It’s a really good point you raise, right? He’s built multiple companies. I don’t know, is Tesla worth $1 billion? I haven’t looked at their market cap. He’s created a lot of share holder value so far in his career.

Neil: Tesla’s, I think, at least a few billion the last time I checked.

Jay: Wow, so you figure PayPal’s obviously worth more than what he sold it for today. A few billion dollars today.

Neil: And then Space Eggs I believe they said has $.5 billion or $1 billion contract. They have hundreds of millions of dollars, they’re worth probably well over $1 billion as well.

Jay: The last thing I want to leave you with and ask you about is I spoke with Dave Larson, Tweet Smarter. @TweetSmarter, right? He has a very interesting thesis about how to grow in popularity. You’ve written some blog posts, that I’ve read on your blog, five steps to becoming famous online and all of these kinds of things. First of all, do you agree with him on increasing your influence? He says that if you help other influential people that they’ll reciprocate that and they’ll help you over time and that’s the fastest, maybe easiest, way to become more popular. Then you can leverage that in some way.

Neil: That’s correct and I do agree with him. That’s what has worked Gary Vaynerchuk. It’s worked for me. It’s worked for him. It’s all about just helping other people out for free and if they pay it back, great. If not, no worries. Keep on helping people for free because you want to, right? You don’t expect anything in return and it really just helps build up your brand.

That doesn’t necessarily make you money, right? Elon Musk isn’t out there in the social world.

Jay: Nope.

Neil: Yeah, sure, he’s on social sites but he doesn’t care. He’s more so trying to change the world with solving big problems. That’s how you really make money.

Jay: Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg, I’ve never seen him on any of these services, right?

Neil: No. Solve a problem and none of that stuff matters. It’s like you’re building a real company and making real money. That’s all that matters at the end of the day.

Jay: But it does help, right? Gary Vaynerchuk, it helped his wine business. I think it certainly has helped you, running your blog and becoming pretty popular out there. It’s probably helped KISSmetrics, right?

Neil: Don’t get me wrong, it does help. It doesn’t help you create that $100 million or $1 billion company. As much as solving a really huge problem. Gary, on the other hand, his brand is really big where it’s working out well for him. I think he’ll get there, right? The wine business is huge. I don’t know the exact profit numbers but they could potentially be worth over $100 million. Branding does help. It’s just, it’s hard to create a $50 million or $50 billion or $100 billion company with a brand. You create those types of really huge companies by solving really big problems.

Jay: It’s a really good point, like platforms, network effects, things like that. Right? Yeah.

The last thing I ask everybody who comes on this show is you could have been doing a lot of other things for the last half hour of your day. Although it seems like you work from home so it fits right into your schedule. But that being said, why did you choose to be a guest on Behind the Web? Why do you do things like Mixergy and these types of shows?

Neil: For me, as an entrepreneur, it’s actually good PR, right? As much as the questions you’re asking me and people are learning from me, I actually learn from you and your audience as well, right? When the post goes live and the video and they start leaving comments and stuff like that sometimes I end up learning from other people as well. It’s all about just learning and I think if you stop learning that’s when you start dying as an entrepreneur.

Jay: That’s great. Thank you very much for coming on the show today. I appreciate you spending all of your time with me. Thank you to everybody who watched.

Neil: Take care.

Jay: Thanks.