From Blogger To $100 Million Business With Neil Patel

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.
To say in your blog post that you go $15,000 a month is all I need. I'm happy. That was like 10 years ago, I think, but you used to say 15,000.

**Neil Patel** (1:11)
Seeing all the no kids is easy. Right now, if I had to guess on my burn rate, 120 to 180 a month.

**Shaan Puri** (1:18)
What?
That's insane. So how does that break down? So what's the bulk of it? So house probably is the biggest one.

**Neil Patel** (1:26)
No, I have no mortgage.

**Shaan Puri** (1:27)
Okay, so you're spending 120 to 180K without spending anything on your home.

**Sam Parr** (1:39)
So Neil, I was telling you a little bit about what you're getting into. We record everything, by the way, so we just hop into it. But, Shaan kind of knows who you are.
I've been a fan of yours for like 10 years. Can I tell Shaan and the audience who I think you are, and you can tell me if I'm wrong and what I'm missing?

**Neil Patel** (1:58)
Sure, go for it.

**Sam Parr** (2:00)
All right, so you're Neil Patel. So I know you because you used to have this blog called Quick Sprout. I read it maybe 10 years ago. It's probably a 15-year-old blog, if I remember correctly. At first, it was mostly about SEO, but eventually it warped into being about SEO, about content, but just about business in general.
And you would do crazy stuff.
You would build a business that made $100,000 a month in revenue by, you just picked a random niche, and I think it ended up being supplements, and you blogged every month about how that was going. And you used to blog about all types of crazy stuff. But then eventually you also started a company called Crazy Egg, which I heard was doing many millions of dollars a year in revenue, and it was a bootstrap and you owned the whole thing.
Then you and Heaton started Kiss Metrics and raised a bunch of money. It didn't end up working out wonderfully, but it was like, it could have been actually quite huge. Heaton wrote a great blog post about like where, you know, where a couple of errors were made. But now you've got like a seven or 800 person agency that is also bootstrapped, like the rest of your stuff. And you've just kind of been balling out, like for like 15 years in the world of business, just killing it with agencies.
Is that right? Did I get everything mostly right?

**Neil Patel** (3:08)
Mostly close. So Crazy Egg came first. Heathen's the co-founder on that. He has it all or, you know, he owns Crazy Egg as well. So it's not just me anymore. And then there's another guy named John Butler, who was also part of Crazy Egg at the beginning.
And then Quick Sprout came later. I started blogging on it about business and stuff like that.
Kissmetrics then came, Kissmetrics didn't work out.
Quick Sprout started to have a big audience related to marketing. We tried to create SEO software on there. I did that with my co-founder, Heathen, at the time. He's like, all right, how about we create a company out of this, I'll do the software. That didn't work out. I didn't want to be part of it anymore. He took it over and he ended up making it a business site, directory, informational site, whatever you want to call it, that has affiliate offers, which you already know about. And then the last one was the ad agency, which is correct. And then there's been a lot of stuff in between here and there. A lot didn't work out. But generally speaking, I tend to do one thing at once, focus and currently I spend all my time on my ad agency.