SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Ep38: Capture 1000 Emails Per Day Fast Neil Patel
09 Nov 2015
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Yesterday, I spoke with YEC founder Scott Gerber on how he's built a 1600 member organization with a 90% annual retention rate. Go check out that episode number 37 from yesterday morning. Okay, Top Tribe, our guest today is Neil Patel. He is the co-author of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and Kiss Metrics.
He helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP, and Viacom grow their revenue. Now, look, 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 has created one of the most 100 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 worldwide. under the age of 35 by the United Nations. He's also been awarded the Congressional Recognition from the United States House of Representatives. Neil, it doesn't get better than that. Are you ready to take us to the top?
I am.
Nice. Good, good. We're excited to have you on. So help folks understand, back in episode number 30 for Heaton, your business partner, walk through kind of self-funding Crazy Egg, looking at raising capital to learn that whole model for Kissmetrics. And then he talked a lot about Quick Sprout and your guys' vision. So help us understand where Quick Sprout is today and what the focus is.
Sure. So Quick Sprout today... is mainly a blog. We write educational content. I more so do the writing. Heathen doesn't do any of the writing. I write educational content.
He lied to me. I asked him on 34. I said, Heathen, do you still sit down and crank out a blog post every now and then? He said no. He said yes.
Yeah, but that's on Heathenism. He doesn't write on Quicksprout.
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Chapter 2: Who is Neil Patel and what are his achievements?
Got it. Okay. He still does write. He also has a SaaS Weekly. Have you ever checked out his newsletter?
Yep. We promoted that in the show notes for his episode.
There you go. He blogs on that. Got it. right? Every Monday at 8 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. It's actually a really good newsletter. Great. Nonetheless, so Quicksprout, we write content on marketing, right? Or pretty much I write the content on marketing. And what we've done is we've built up this community of over the years, Ethan and I,
in which we're trying to help other entrepreneurs grow their traffic, their business, generate more sales online, et cetera. And it's actually worked really well. Over the years, more people have actually emailed us saying like, oh, this is awesome. I've got more sales or more traffic or whatever it may be.
And what we're now trying to do is see if we can scale up the process even more through product, right? So right now, people are using Google Analytics, they're using consultants to try to figure out how to actually grow their traffic. Why can't a software solution tell you what changes you need to make to grow your traffic?
Not looking at reports, not digging through your source code or any of that, but just some tool, some app Right. That just says, hey, make these changes and you will get more traffic. And even better yet, how can you actually just click those buttons and the changes get made for you and you get even more traffic? Right. So it's like that's what we're trying to build that quick sprout.
That's what Ethan's working on.
That's great. I want to dig deeper into that. But Neil, for anyone listening right now from the top tribe that doesn't know Neil, I'll just throw this out there. Quicksprout's getting, and again, I'm taking data from a third party, similarweb.com. So Neil, correct me if it's greater or less than this, but they're getting about 3.9 million monthly website visits on Quicksprout. So I don't
want Neil to spend time talking about their content strategy there because he does that in all kinds of interviews on the web. So just go check it out and watch what he's doing. Subscribe to his newsletter, which we'll link to in the show notes at nathanlatka.com forward slash the top 38. But Neil, take us deeper into these products that you're looking to build. Are they software? Are they SaaS?
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Chapter 3: What is Quick Sprout and what does it focus on?
But if you have a website and you're just trying to grow your traffic, it'll actually work for you. It won't work for people who are just on the social web and just be like, oh, I want to make my Instagram profile more popular, right? Or I just want to focus only on my Facebook profile and nothing else. It's not meant for you.
It's meant for people who have a website and they're trying to do business online.
And is the way that you came up with whatever this piece of software is, I'm guessing, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing as you built QuickSprout, you kind of saw things that you could kind of automate and take from a human doing it, even maybe you doing it, to having a software do it.
If that is the case, what kinds of elements as you were building QuickSprout took the most time and how have you taken that and basically built it into the software product so it does it by itself for anybody else?
Yeah, so we're still in early building phases, right? It's more so as we were building Quicksprout and then Kissmetrics blog and then the Crazy Egg site and then Hello Bar, as well as consulting for hundreds of other companies. We figured out what works and what doesn't and what you have to spend time on.
And what Heathen was doing while I was doing a lot of the consulting and he was also participating in the consulting, but what Heathen was doing was figuring out, all right, what of this can we automate, right? Instead of just adding more headcount, how can we automate this kind of stuff?
How can we take all this data that we're releasing and the stuff we're doing and put packaging in the software so companies can do it without having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on marketing?
Was there something specific though, Neil, that you can remember, like a specific task that you can tell us the story about how you're going to automate that in the software?
There's no one specific task. In marketing, it's a lot of little things that add up. For example, a lot of times on your site, you have duplicate title and meta description tags. If you have that, it hurts your search and your rankings. Why can't a software just tell you, here are all the duplications, here's what you should fix, and here's the suggestions on what they should be.
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Chapter 4: How does Neil Patel plan to scale up his products?
It's an exit gate. So as your mouse cursor moves across the URL bar, etc., it pops up. I'm just testing it out to see. So Facebook is all about their edge rank algorithm, right? How can you get the most amount of likes for the least amount of fans? So you're better off getting 100 likes from 100 fans than you would be having 10,000 fans and getting 100 likes.
Because if 100% of your fans like it, they're much more likely to spread across more of their friends, etc. The more people see it, it goes much more viral. So my blog readers are very loyal. They comment, they engage, etc. They open up emails.
So if I can get them to like, they're much more likely to actually like and share and comment on the content on Facebook than random people or from people I'm finding through ads.
Well, it makes complete sense. And I'd love to, once you're done running this little test, to see what kind of traffic you're getting there. But guys, again, for the top tribe listening, I don't know a better way to understand really the tactics that Neil is executing outside of telling you to go to neilpatel.com. When I was, again, prepping for this, you go to the site.
It's unlike any site you've really seen. It kind of looks like a Groupon almost landing page. It says, do you want more traffic? And then it says, hi, I'm Neil. I'm determined to make you a...
a business in and then he inserts i think via probably javascript or code the city you're in successful and then it's i love neil the last question it says my only question is will it be yours and i'm going well shit yeah neil like i want it to be mine take my information take it all now yeah i'm pretty creative of a marketer so I love it. I encourage people to just go through it.
They'll learn the most doing that. So, Neil, we've learned a lot so far. We've learned about how you're thinking about freemium for your new business. Specifically, it's a software tool that you would have used back when you started Quicksprout. Okay, Top Tribe, I want to give you more brain juice this month. Totally free.
If you're loving this episode, text the word NATHAN to 33444 for your chance to win a prize on an upcoming show. The next prize is a pack of 14 business books valued at $250 if you bought them on Amazon. And these books are the ones that Mark Zuckerberg thinks every entrepreneur must read. So we're getting to my favorite part of the show. Neil, do you know what time it is? What time?
Come on, Neil. You're letting me down, man. It's time for the famous five. Are you ready? I'm ready. All right. Number one, what is your favorite business book?
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