From Ad Agencies to AI: The Neil Patel Story | Digital Social Hour #24

All right, welcome to the Digital Social Hour.

I'm your host, Sean Kelly.

I'm joined with my co-host, Wayne Lewis.

What up, what up?

And our guest today, Neil Patel.

And thank you guys for having me.

Absolutely.

What's up, brother?

How you doing?

Doing good.

You said it best earlier.

We woke up today, you know?

Right, love it.

You have to be grateful for every single day that you have.

Yeah, absolutely.

Gotta get it in.

Give people the rundown on your journey for those that don't know you.

Sure.

So, uh, I feel like I'm getting old, although I'm still young.

I'm 37.

I've been doing this for

call it 21, 22 years right now.

I started 15 and a half, so however, you want to slice and dice the numbers.

And

yeah, I started off my career in marketing, still in marketing today.

I had a lot of different businesses from software companies, ad agency.

Some failed, some didn't do well.

You know, when I was 16, when I really got my start,

I gave a speech at a college.

I was a book nerd.

And my parents would always tell me, like, you're not going to make the NBA.

You know, they're like, do you see tons of Indians in the Olympics?

And I'm like, yeah, that's true.

You really don't see tons of Indians in the Olympics.

And my parents are like, you're good at math.

You're good at science.

You know, you're great with school.

Stick to something that you naturally are great at.

So did well in school.

I also took nighttime college classes while I was in high school.

My first class was speech 101, give a speech on how Google's algorithm works and how to rank on Google.

And I got a contract there for five grand a month.

Made them around $20, $25 million in extra revenue.

Google?

No, no, no.

So a guy in that class, he worked for a power supply manufacturer.

Okay.

And he's just like, my company's looking for someone like you that understands Google and can help us get traffic wrong.

Because back then, you're talking about 20 plus years ago, right?

That's a long time.

That was around Yahoo.

Was around that.

Yeah, Yahoo.

There you go.

People don't even talk about Yahoo anymore.

But yeah, you're right.

And he's just like, hey, my company wants to hire someone like you.

And they first actually hired me on an hourly basis for like $100, $200 an hour, somewhere around there.

And it was for like a block of 10 hours.

They were like, Can you just do this for us?

So then they gave me, they're paying me five grand a month.

I'm 16.

Five grand a month at 16 is a lot of money.

That's a lot.

Yeah, it's a lot.

For sure.

And I drove them in the first year around $20, $25 million in revenue.

Somewhere around

first year.

You should have been making $2 million a year at that point.

I wish.

The owner of that company, his son, had an ad agency.

So then he sold my services at the time to Blue Cross, ING Direct, and Countrywide.

Well, Countrywide was a mortgage company that went belly under, got gobbled up by Bank of America during the 2008 crisis.

So he was giving me five grand a client.

You know, I'm a little kid, $20,000 a month.

That's a lot.

That's a lot of money.

$20,000 a month is a lot right now.

I could live off that.

Facts.

And that's how I got my start.

Wow.

So then from there, you go where?

From there, started an ad agency.

At what age?

16 still.

Oh, you were.

So wait, so all this was happening at 16.

So you went like, no, no, this is the next year.

Yeah, yeah, no, 16.

Okay.

I was having an office and everything like that, and employees going to the office before I was going to college.

Are you still going to school?

Like, yeah, I was going to school, yeah.

Why didn't you just drop out?

Trust me, I wish my parents agreed with that.

They're like, no good Indian girl is going to marry you if you don't have a college degree.

Asian parents will not let you drop out.

Yeah, and then, so my parents wanted me to get married, and they're like, no Indian girl is going to marry you.

And then eventually, I'm 37 now.

I'm married.

I have two kids.

When did you get married?

That's a good question.

Maybe four years ago?

Oh, so it still took a while.

It took a long time.

You could have dropped out.

Yeah, it could have dropped out.

And then my parents were at one point like,

instead of no good Indian girl's going to marry you, then it became no good girl's going to marry you to just like get married.

Right.

And they're like, we don't care if you get married.

My parents don't care.

Like, if you get married to a guy, girl, we don't care.

Just get married.

And then

I got married, and my wife and I, we had two kids, and they were excited.

The moment I had my first kid, my dad was ecstatic.

He's like, oh, I never would have guessed you got married or had a kid.

Indian wife?

No, she's not Indian.

She's a mutt.

She's mixed.

Some Korean, some Chinese, Mongolian, some American, some European.

She's like a true Mutt.

Okay.

So are your kids darker skin or lighter skin?

My kids look white.

Okay.

Oh, they do?

They look white, yeah.

So, and I know they're my kids because I had them during like COVID and stuff like that.

So

they're my kids, but my wife looks more Asian.

I look Indian.

And our kids are mixed.

But funny enough, for me, you guys grew up in Vegas?

No, I didn't grow up in Legal.

No.

Where'd you grow up?

I grew up in L.A.

I moved out here

I went to UNOV for a little while.

Oh, cool.

Same here.

Jersey.

Jersey.

So in L.A., I grew up in L.A., there's a lot of diversity.

In Vegas, there's not as much diversity, at least from what I've seen.

But in L.A., like every other person is like,

no one cares anything.

It's just, it's a big melting pot.

Yeah, it is.

I mean, Vegas is too.

It's a lot of kind of just transplants here they just kind of left

but i felt there was much more of a melting pot in los angeles yeah

but it's also more populated

yeah i mean now it's i mean i think vegas is taking over but yeah

vegas is booming super yeah

so are you back to your journey so you started an agency at 16 then what did you do you do after that

During the 2008 crisis, we lost a lot of customers.

So when a lot of these companies went belly up, like during the financial crisis, right, with homes and all that kind of stuff, subprime, we lost a lot of revenue.

Right.

And that hurt the agency.

But a year or two before that, we started a software company.

And the software company kept doing well.

So I shifted my focus to software.

That was a nice pivot.

Yeah, it was a nice pivot.

Got lucky.

And the software company did really well.

We kept going.

We still have it today.

It's called Crazy Egg.

My sister Amy runs it.

She's been doing a great job.

It still grows

surely, but slowly but surely.

And,

you know, did a few companies in between.

Some of them did well.

A lot of them failed miserably and lost a lot of money.

But the ones that did well made up for all the losses.

Did you guys ever IPO?

It's Crazy Egg.

Yeah, no, never did IPO.

That was probably a good thing.

Yeah.

I don't think we have really had the opportunity back then to

IPO.

My latest company, we had the chance to IPO in this market.

My latest one is an ad agency called NP Digital.

doing that for five years.

And that one took off like a rocket ship.

We're like the 21st fastest growing company in the United States, according to Inc.

Wow.

And we bootstrapped it,

self-funded the whole thing.

And

we went from zero to

a solid, like real solid nine figures in less than five years.

That's insane.

That's not bad.

Yeah, that's not bad at all.

So, you know, and

people started hitting us up saying, would you ever consider IPO?

Because we had high growth and profitability.

We still do.

that's just not me like the only thing about it is that you got to give up a lot of control when you um ipo and and

who wants to deal with the stress i deal with the stock going up and down some people do i mean board members kind of silently selling your company to the public in a sense that's true it really is it's a great form of liquidity you you leverage you know obviously um you're able to scale up because you know it's a lot of money being given to you that's true you know and then your net worth goes up and then you're able to possibly sell at some point maybe if you want to cash out buy out well we had a lot of buyout offers as well i've had multiple buyout offers for majority of the company actually all the companies that i did that did well all had buyout offers right and i've never really cared to sell a business like even the current one the ad agency i don't know how many buyout offers we've had way more than five Maybe like seven, eight, nine.

I don't know.

Are you emotionally attached to them?

Like, is that why you don't have to do that?

Yeah, they're like babies.

Oh, okay.

Well, there it goes.

This is like a kid.

You know, you can't give up your kids.

You're not doing it for the money.

I love the money.

The money,

the money's a scorecard saying that you're doing well in business.

Right.

I don't care for the money.

Like, I have a Honda Odyssey.

So, yeah, but that's by choice.

Sure, yeah.

And I'm not saying I drive around the Honda Odyssey all the time.

Like, when I'm busy, like working right now.

I have a driver.

He drove me here.

Okay, okay.

Well, so that was a little bit of a drive.

I have a Honda Odyssey.

Well, that's by choice.

No, I like

But I prefer the Honda Odyssey.

It's a more convenient car when you have little kids and they hop in and out.

And

life is chill.

But I don't care for things like big homes, fancy cars.

Like, I never dreamed about having a Ferrari.

I never dreamed about having, you know, a 20,000 square foot house.

None of those things where I was like, oh my God, like, look at this house or look at this neighborhood I live in.

What did you dream about?

Building a bigger business.

And then...

concept same concept and the more people you employ the bigger you get the more revenue you make it's just a milestone and for me that's like my you know drug of choice right and my wife her dream was always donating volunteering her time trying to change the world and my wife does a lot in education and she has this thesis so you know we lived in la for a long time

and we have this thesis you know and I'm not trying to talk trash here but like you take the kids from Beverly Hills, a lot of them do well in life.

And again, not trying to talk trash on people living in Beverly Hills.

We even have a house there.

So, you know, no diss to people there.

But if you take people from the inner city, like, you know, Compton or East LA or places like that.

I bet you if you give those kids the same tools and the same education as you throw in that kid in Beverly Hills with their hustle, I bet you they would outshine a lot of the kids in Beverly Hills.

If you look at like averages, right like yes you're gonna get one-offs people do better but i just believe they have the hustle and well because of the the hungers there when you talk about you know um like you said dreaming i think uh most kids in those inner cities dream the most because um right it's not available you know you're not inspired by what's around you it's it's almost like a dream yeah so yeah they're gonna work twice as hard which most of the athletes and most you know musicians and artists that are successful come from the inner cities.

Facts.

They don't have a choice.

Yeah.

They don't have a choice.

But to dream.

We thrive off of that.

Yes.

So speaking of education, what are your thoughts on the public education system?

Do you plan on sending your kids to public school?

So our kids are young, three and one.

My wife and I, funny enough, talk about this all the time.

Right now they go to private school because it's preschool and there's not really

free schooling when they're three years old or one years old.

Here we do have options for private school in the future.

And I tell my wife, I was like, let's go back to SoCal and send our kids to public school.

I went to public school.

I did just fine.

I think the public schools, there's a lot of good ones there.

Or we can stick around in Vegas, which I'm happy with as well, and send our kids to public school here.

I like public schools.

I heard Vegas has.

I heard Vegas has the worst, though.

It's ranked 49th out of all the states.

Yeah, but I think everywhere is bad.

California, New York, Massachusetts,

there's a lot of good schools there.

Seattle has some good schools.

It depends what city, right?

Because even California, there's some bad schools in California and good ones.

But like, for example, I grew up in Orange County, California.

The public schools were decent.

Yeah, but the curriculum is all the same.

They're not even teaching us the right stuff.

So no matter what school you send them to, they'll never learn taxes.

That's right.

They'll never learn about stock.

They'll never learn about how to buy a home.

They'll never learn about mortgage.

Savings.

What to do during a downturn?

History is wrong.

You know, the math that they're teaching.

None of us in here has used algebra three yet.

Yeah.

You're so right.

I did extremely well in math as a kid.

No matter what we're doing in my life.

The education system isn't going to be right.

That's right.

I feel like the ranking is based on the demographic of where the school is actually placed.

Where you get kids are actually

troubled kids.

Most of them are being suspended.

They don't get the good teachers because teachers don't want to work in that area.

That ranking is

biased.

I think it has to do with money.

So when you look at that, you're like, oh, no, I'll send them to this school because it's a better ranking when really that's a paid private school.

They have the money to rank themselves in a better place.

So you have to look at it.

Yeah, they're bringing better teachers and all that.

It's marketing.

Yeah.

Obviously, you're in that industry, so you know, you know.

Yeah.

So, but that's really so.

Like, going back to my wife, she loves education and funding things education-related or,

you know, anything related to kids,

poverty, food for children.

My wife always jokes around.

She's like, I don't know how we survive, and there's two of us.

Like, imagine how a lot of these parents survive when they're a single parent.

I think about that too.

Like, that's it's a hard life.

They don't have money for nannies or all that kind of stuff.

They got to figure out they got to work multiple jobs, provide, cook, clean.

They're doing everything, right?

Like, to think about how kids are surviving in that situation, situation, props to the parents, props to the kids.

And

it's how do you,

you know, we're not here to tell people what to do with their money to each though, and anyone can do whatever they want.

But, like, for us, it makes my wife and I happy to give to those communities, give to those parents in those situations, and try to bring up the rest of the population in a really tiny way because we don't have enough money to really make a big impact, but we do whatever we can.

That's awesome.

So, I hear hear Google is getting rid of the cookies.

Is that a real thing?

That's right.

Next year, 2024.

Is it because they've got the information that they needed from us and they can carry that on and continue to build their AI infrastructure?

Well, for them, they control the browser.

They have analytics.

They have the search gallery.

They have YouTube.

They have the email.

So they're done with their research and experiments.

They got the phone, too.

I know a lot of us have iPhones.

You probably have an iPhone, right?

I got an iPhone.

You got an iPhone?

But majority of people in the world are on Android.

They're not on iOS.

Really?

Yeah, majority of the world are on iPhone.

I thought the iPhone was the biggest.

No,

it's Android.

Majority of the world can't afford an iPhone.

Oh, Androids are cheaper?

Way cheaper.

Okay.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, me neither.

Interesting.

You're talking about a thousand dollar phone.

I was in Brazil a few weeks ago.

Did you know an iPhone in Brazil costs more than an iPhone in the United States?

Even after the currency exchange and everything, if you just look at it USD to USD, it costs more money there than here when you know people don't make that kind of money in Brazil.

That's wow.

And it's an up-and-coming country, right?

They're booming, they're growing fast, but still, how the heck are people affording it?

But why are they getting rid of the cookies?

I was trying to like

understand why.

Also, they're going back to privacy.

So they took our privacy away.

Okay, you guys will have it back.

We got pretty much everything we need from you.

Well, there's a lot of regulation changes happening throughout the whole world.

World,

like GDPR, and you have just different countries getting more and more strict on what you can do with people's data so it they're Google's making moves and so is Apple and other players

to

not just follow the laws but to be proactive with privacy now don't get me wrong so what does that do for the companies who are actually you using Google ads to gather um the pixels and Google will be fine they're not gonna make a change that's gonna crush their revenue oh gotcha but when Apple made the changes to privacy it hurt Facebook's revenue I remember that not Apple's revenue yeah yeah when When Google makes a change, it'll probably hurt Facebook's revenue again, but it won't hurt Google's revenue.

So

they're turning into competitors.

Yeah,

it's also a way to,

you know, you box this a way to ding up your competitors and bruise them up.

Yeah.

Are you scared or excited about AI?

I'm excited about AI.

I just don't think it's...

It's hyped a lot.

And it's progressing at a really fast pace, which is great.

Hyper fast.

Yeah.

But the thing with AI, everyone's like, oh, it's going to replace humans.

It's going to replace, you know, content writers.

It's going to replace everything.

I'm like,

we're so far away from that, though.

It will.

Like seven years away.

That's in short time.

Probably some companies three.

But we're not far away from it.

I mean, we were far away from it back in 2000.

And back in 2000, even more far away.

We were far, but we're close now.

And I don't have the exact answer or crystal ball on how close, but like if I had a guess, at least in the marketing marketing world, in the next five years, I do not see AI replacing a human.

And it's still a short time, though, bro.

It's still

even more than that.

And here's why:

here's a basic concept with AI.

So, check this out.

If you want to think about like everyone talks about AI writing content, there's way more to AI with systems and processes and automation with analytics and getting more informed decisions.

But let's just look at content as a basic example.

When you do a search on Google or any search engine, are the results always 100% accurate when you look up some of these stuff?

They're actually bad.

Yeah, a lot of times they're off.

Now, Google knows this.

Bing knows this.

They've been working not five, not 10, maybe 20 plus years to fix misinformation, and it's not perfect.

What AI is doing is scraping the web, gathering all the information out there, and spitting out an output based on the input.

So if they're gathering false inputs, right, not all of them are false, but even if a small percentage of them are, it can screw up the outputs.

And that's what you're seeing with AI.

And yes, AI will get better, but you're still going to have a lot of bad information because the inputs are off, and that's not easy to fix.

And I don't see that being fixed over the next five, six, seven years.

Interesting.

Well, even with the input, the input is based off of what humans actually input into the system.

So AI is actually getting a lot more sophisticated daily because of the usage.

That's right.

We have over 100 million users using it.

I mean, daily, you know, what that breaks down to hourly.

And when it comes to the minute, you know, I can't give you those numbers, but I'm sure it's up there.

It's crazy.

I think the information will get better, but I, you know, potentially, I hope it will.

But I think AI is a, I think people should be not technically scared because I feel like they should work with it, but they should be worried.

The ones that aren't educating themselves.

I think you nailed it.

People should be working with it.

If you embrace AI and you learn how to leverage it to do a better job at the company you work at or for your own business, you're going to get even further in life.

Absolutely.

But if you stay afraid of it and you're just like, no, I don't want to touch it, I think you're going to start becoming replaced by other people who either understand AI, know how to leverage it, or you're going to get replaced by AI, one or the other.

Which AI are you using right now?

So we use a lot of the open AI.

They have some APIs and they're the ones that created ChatGPT.

And Bing is using them.

But we use a lot of their APIs to help make better informed decisions for our business and it's still early phases and none of it's like really perfect but like you said you know five years is gonna be really dangerous I think even in a few years it's gonna make our lives much easier December we'll start feeling the impact for I mean people are feeling it now but by December I feel like impactful it'll start making a a little bit of a push yeah

and I think every day that goes by these AI tools and the learning that they have is just incredible because of so many daily users.

Me and Sean text almost what we text all the time.

It's making some of my contracts now.

It's pretty crazy.

That's cool.

Yeah, for sure.

You prompted and it makes a contract.

So instead of paying a lawyer $500 an hour, you just send it to the lawyer, say, can you review this real quick?

That's smart.

I never thought about that.

Yeah, dude, it's

NDAs, disclaimers, contracts.

Even it breaks down.

He was showing me

one tool won't disclose it, but it was breaking down the episodes in the sense of like of like place value so you can do coursework too.

You can like turn it into a course if you want.

Yeah, that's cool.

So you put a two-hour podcast on it and it breaks down the key points for you.

That's awesome.

So it digests the podcast for you.

Right.

Yeah.

And that uses open AI.

It's pretty crazy.

Yeah.

Open AI is amazing.

Yeah.

I think Google's Bard is going to be really good.

You know, I know a lot of people are counting out Google, but Google has so much information.

They have more than OpenAI or anyone else out there.

I do believe their AI is going to be amazing.

It's just going to take time.

It's going to take time, but they can be late to the game because you still got China's going to get involved heavy.

And

when they come, I mean, chat, GPT might just be a poodle.

I just can't count them out either.

So Google has to, they're going to drop.

They got to do it now.

And

waiting,

they won't benefit from waiting.

because every system that's out, if you think about it, it's getting more and more sophisticated daily.

So, how can their system advance if they're waiting later to drop?

By the time they drop, these systems will be far more advanced.

Google will still be technically in beta.

Yeah, and I think they're pushing really hard.

But the way I look at it is if you look at the most popular social network right now, let's call it Facebook.

I know Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp.

Facebook wasn't the first, right?

There's a lot of others that came.

MySpace was a lot earlier.

Google wasn't the first search engine either.

Yahoo was before there.

Alta Vista, Lycos, the list goes on and on.

But it's a race right now because it's a sophistication race.

Yeah.

So who's going to be far more sophisticated in this AI space and at what speed?

You got chat four already dropped, right, Sean?

Yeah.

And then they're working on 4.5.

So, I mean...

It's going to get crazy.

And when you look at from three to four and all the variations, just the improvements are so crazy.

And they're also trying to make it cheaper and cheaper.

What are the biggest opportunities you see for 2023 and 2024?

From a marketing standpoint,

this is gonna sound silly.

I actually don't think it's AI.

I think podcasting is one of them.

Podcasting isn't that competitive.

There's like less than 10 million podcasts, over a billion blogs.

So if you think about the ratios, it's an open landscape still.

So that's one of them.

Two is taking an omni-channel approach with marketing.

Like when we try to acquire customers from TikTok and our ad agency, we're seeing that for our clients, a lot of times TikTok is like 40-50% cheaper than Facebook ads.

Wow.

Which is better.

Yeah, which is

a better algorithm, too.

So it's just like, that's just so much cheaper.

Why wouldn't you want to save the money and acquire as many people as possible for as little as possible?

The other big opportunity that we're seeing, and this one's the dead simplest one, but just people are lazy and no one wants to take the time.

Updating your content.

No matter what you search for on Google or anywhere on social media, there's already content on that topic.

The issue is, is most of the content is old, outdated.

So the algorithms of social platforms and search engines don't want to showcase it.

But the moment you keep it fresh and up to date,

it'll boost you.

Just look at Wikipedia.

They rank and get so much traffic because people keep modifying Wikipedia pages every single day.

Yeah, yeah.

I probably bet every single minute someone's modifying a Wikipedia page.

I don't have the stats or data on that, but if I had to take a guess, I bet you it's on the minute basis.

Probably.

What is

reverse ETL?

Can you explain that to us?

Reverse ETL.

I don't know what reverse ETO is.

ETL.

ETL?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ETL.

I don't know what reverse ETL is.

Well, I was looking through your

MP Digital.

Uh-huh.

One of your associates was touching basis on it.

It was real interesting to me.

So it was the difference between gathering data and then inputting the data when it comes to like your ads and stuff like that.

I found it interesting.

I have no idea what reverse ETL is, but that's why we have 750 people that specialize in different things.

That's a good answer.

I should learn it.

Don't get me wrong.

I mean, I learned a lot just from, you know, just kind of looking into it.

I'm like, okay, I never heard of that.

So, yeah, me neither.

She looked at us.

Talking about ads and stuff.

Yeah, we have so many people that specialize in different things.

Like we have, we literally have a handful of people.

Yeah, 700 employees.

Yeah, seven something, just in that company.

That's a lot.

Just in that one, and we're still hiring.

But like, when I look at it, are you not going to replace with AI?

We're even using AI, but we still need.

We're expanding fast internationally.

So like we're opening up this year in France, Italy, Germany.

We just added Singapore.

We just added ahead of LATAM to expand it to Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina.

We just, I think we mentioned Singapore.

We're interviewing right now for a head of Malaysia.

I just finished interviewing today for a head of Spain.

Is it mandatory for your employees to learn how to use AI and work with it?

Uh-huh.

You can make it mandatory so you don't have to get rid of anybody in your workforce.

No, we want them to figure out how to use AI to make their job more efficient so they can focus on the things that are important and not do the mundane, boring stuff.

That's how they do it.

I like that.

I like that model.

You feel like celebrity endorsements are a waste of money.

Why do you feel that way?

So I feel celebrity endorsements are a waste because most of them are too generic it's like let's talk about the kardashians you know some people hate on the kardashians but you got to admit they built an amazing business empire yeah you got to respect that yeah and it doesn't matter what people think about the kardashians or how they got popular

They were really smart on how they took that fame or how they built up that fame and took that fame and turned it into a big business empire.

Not just for one of them, but for pretty much the whole family.

If you get Kylie Jenner to push, if I get Kylie Jenner to push my marketing agency, NP Digital, I may get some leads, but it's just irrelevant.

Like her audience is like into makeup and cosmetics and clothing and stuff.

And that's why most celebrity endorsements don't work because it doesn't match the product.

And now you have it where so many people are using celebrity endorsements for everything and they're being brand evangelists.

It's not working that well.

But the moment you get like

Rihanna to create her own company, or you get Kylie Jenner to create her own company, people are like, oh, you're not pushing someone else, and you're not just getting paid, you're creating your own products.

Which they're supposed to.

Yeah, which is what they should be doing.

And that people love and that converts really well.

But the products got to be aligned.

Like, for example, let's say The Rock.

The Rock is known for like fitness, humor.

The guy's like buff.

He's smart.

He's good with business.

But if he created a course, being like, here's how to pass your CPA exam, I'm going to teach you guys how to do really well in accounting.

And accounting is a big business, right?

There's a lot of massive accounting companies throughout the whole world.

Everyone does taxes.

People have to do accounting for every single business, even personal finances.

It just wouldn't convert well.

It doesn't line up.

But if Rock sports an energy drink, which he does,

it makes sense.

So they got to do their own products.

I do think there is value in influencers if the celebrity is directly aligned to the product and service and is really involved in the business.

And believes in it.

Yes, like Ryan Reynolds and Mitt sold for 1.3.

Ryan didn't create Mitt.

They gave him equity to be the evangelist and be part of the company and help out.

He believed in it.

He wanted to put in the time and the energy.

Flowrider and Celsius.

Yeah.

Which he had to sue to get his money back.

So he still made a lot of money.

Yeah, it's good for him.

And then the other one is

You know, if you get a micro influencer, like someone who's known for like something really specific, even if they'll have like a half a million followers or a hundred thousand, but their audience is super engaged because they're really well known for it.

Like you do boxing.

If you have someone who has 250,000 followers on Instagram, but they're known for like teaching like crazy boxing techniques and strategy.

And they're like, you got to check out these winning gloves, right?

Winning's a brand of gloves.

And if they say, you got to check out winning gloves, they're the best, and they break them down, even if it's a paid endorsement, people will listen because that person is a specialist within that subject.

That's where I think.

And that's a huge opportunity right now in marketing in 2023, 2024.

I even see that going to five, six years from now.

AI cannot replace that.

People want to deal with companies that have a face.

No one likes faceless companies, but it has to be a line.

I can't have LeBron James pitching my marketing company.

Yes, Yes, he's a business mogul.

He's crashing it, but people don't know LeBron James from marketing.

I'm not saying he's a bad marketer.

I'm just saying people know him for marketing.

I mean, basketball.

Yeah, not marketing.

So, but if he had a new basketball that has some special grip on it, he would be perfect for it.

Exactly.

Or shoes or even something for fitness like tonal, right?

I bought a tonal because of LeBron James.

Oh, is that the ice thing?

No, a tonal is like resistance.

It's like you can, it's electric resistance, so you can modify the resistance.

He's an investor in that company?

Yes, I think he has equity in it for sure.

Or investor or equity owner.

Maybe you got it for free.

I don't know, but I saw Serena Williams on the commercial and saw LeBron James on the company.

How important is for e-comm, people who are in e-comm, to use a SurveyMonkey?

I think it's great because you can figure out what's wrong with your pages, your products, and what changes you need to make to...

make them better because like when you look at analytics like google analytics yeah you can see oh people are leaving this page but why are they leaving that page?

SurveyMonkey, the survey versions, there's quantitative data and there's qualitative.

Quantitative is like the numbers, qualitative is him getting feedback.

SurveyMonkey is like a

version of just talking to people and getting feedback.

Hey, why aren't you buying?

Why are you leaving the page?

What else would you like to see?

Super effective.

We like taking all that data, assuming you're getting enough quantity and responses, not like one or two, but if you're getting like 50, 60, 100 for a specific page, and you make changes, we usually see revenue revenue and conversions go up.

Wow.

So it's based on the consumer's perspective of how you can make your company from a visibility standpoint better.

Exactly.

By asking them simple questions in regards to, you know, they're happy or not with the service or product.

Yep.

What else would you like to see on the page?

Why didn't you buy?

You know.

How many business owners actually modify their business based on the consumer's perspective?

Very little.

Very That's terrible.

That is.

That's terrible.

You get a stubborn business owner.

I used to do it.

Yeah.

It would record their checkout screen and see what they were doing.

Yeah.

It's important because it's research.

It's market research.

You're able to scale your business up from that just by understanding your consumer.

That's right.

Is LinkedIn underrated?

I think LinkedIn's massively underrated, especially if you're in B2B.

It's like one of the best social networks for generating revenue for a business.

LinkedIn's probably our

if I had a guess right now, I'm pretty sure YouTube is number one for social channels for revenue for us,

for our consulting company, and LinkedIn is number two.

Whoa, wow.

That's Mark Zuckerberg's ex-business partner created LinkedIn.

Really?

Yeah.

Oh, I didn't know that.

That's his company.

He's got a lot of ex-partners that are successful.

Yeah.

That's what happens when you got a group of people that are successful.

Mark's made a shitload of money.

He has.

Everybody associated with too.

Yeah.

Either by selling him or creating something else.

Yeah, facts.

What platforms do you see taking over?

Social media platforms?

Platforms.

I see TikTok booming.

I see WhatsApp as still a big opportunity.

No one's really figuring out how to use it.

Why?

Why?

I see Tencent owns them and they're like the biggest conglomerate, but why here?

Like what impact does WhatsApp have in the U.S.?

So

WhatsApp,

everyone globally is

everyone globally right now on WhatsApp is using it because in a lot of countries, it costs money to text.

It's free to text.

It's free to text on WhatsApp.

It's also controlled by the government over there, too.

TikTok is, right?

WhatsApp is.

WhatsApp is owned by Facebook.

No, it's owned by a company called Tencent.

That's TikTok.

Oh, TikTok.

Yeah, TikTok.

WhatsApp is, too.

Facebook bought them out.

Facebook bought WhatsApp.

Oh, so Tencent used to own them then.

No, no, no.

WhatsApp was funded by Sequoia Capital.

It was some founders based in San Francisco.

You're thinking of WeChat.

That's what WeChat.

My bad, you guys.

That's WeChat.

Okay.

Because I, okay, okay.

So Tencent.

I agree.

WeChat's popular, I think, in Korea, right?

No, it's everywhere now, but it's Kako Talk.

Caco Talk is Korea.

Cocko Talk.

WeChat.

Yeah, Capo Talk.

WeChat is China.

That's China.

That's right.

Tencent owns them.

Yeah.

Okay, so WhatsApp.

Okay, okay, okay.

But TikTok might get banned.

TikTok may get banned.

You never know.

I don't think it will.

I think maybe for governments and stuff, they'll regulate it.

But in the U.S., I still think it'll be popular.

People love it.

The college campuses are banning it, but.

Oh, colleges are?

Probably,

I think they said 30, 40% already.

Big time colleges.

Universities banned it already.

Why?

Yeah, why would they ban it?

The data?

They banned TikTok, but not Adderall.

They want the students on that.

I knew when I was in college, I knew so many students that were just taking Adderall so bad.

I don't know why they're doing it.

You weren't on it?

No.

Wow, Sean.

No, props, because I feel like everyone was.

I've never even.

And if people want to get on, I don't think there's...

It's up to them.

I was just a big believer in,

you know.

I try to be natural as much as possible.

Yeah.

So Facebook owns WeChat.

TikTok.

No, I mean, sorry.

Facebook owns.

WhatsApp.

WhatsApp.

Yeah, they also were the TikTok.

Are we good now?

Yeah, yeah.

WeChat, China.

Okay.

Kakotak, Korea.

I don't know what that is.

Yeah, you got to check it out.

It's big for the Korean market.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

We got to wrap it up soon, but I want to know the best hire you've ever made.

Was it the chef?

Was it the driver?

Who was it?

Personal or corporate?

Let's do both.

Corporate CEO.

I'm a terrible operator.

We have a CEO named Mike Gulligson.

He's done wonders for us.

I wouldn't say he's an only amazing hire, but he's brought a lot of amazing people with him.

And there's a lot of amazing people we brought before him that helped us get him.

But we continually try to bring amazing people who have done what we're looking to do and they've already done it before.

Like he ran one of our competitors, it was called iProspect.

I don't know how many employees they had, maybe 5,000, I'm guessing, 6,000, 7,000 or 4,000, or something like that.

They're just a larger version of us.

So he's already done what we were trying to do, and he helped us grow.

When we got him, maybe we were 200, 300 people.

He's more than doubled us in size.

And

personal,

it depends who you ask.

If you ask my wife, she's going to say a nanny.

The nanny.

Edith, who's been amazing.

If you ask me,

I would say

either Philmon, who drove me here today, I love him to death, or Franny, who helps us clean, but that's not, she does an amazing job there.

But why I love Franny is...

I travel almost every single week for work and like she'll have my suitcase ready with all my clothes, depending on how many days I'm gone I don't have to check anything and it's just like so convenient that sounds amazing I'm packing a day for New York and it sucks wow third world problems right right yeah and then another question um

what are

some things that you can tell a lot of people out there struggling with e-comm like what makes the e-commerce business do good and what makes the e-comm business like what makes it what's the difference in a good one and a bad e-comm business so good ones typically have funnels like upsells and downsells because if someone's buying one product you already got them buying you got to get them to buy more right and you got to figure out how to upsell them ideally the products that you upsell are related to the core product that they bought and it offers anything helping get results in an automated way or uh

getting results faster so speed or automation

if people can get results faster or in an automated way they'll you typically pay for the upsells but what about when it comes to clothing because everyone isn't selling like an actual product sure so like clothing, if someone buying underwear, you know they're going to need underwear.

I don't know how often people replace them every year or socks every year, every six months.

Or if they buy t-shirts, they're going to need more t-shirts like mine here.

They have some holes on it, little ones.

And I buy like 12 of the same white t-shirt and it lasts for a while.

And that's what also makes it easy to pack because I wear the same clothes.

Same thing, same colors.

And they could send reminders saying like, hey, click here for a subscription or click here to get

a new shirt or we have a new style that's coming in.

I think email marketing is huge.

A lot of people take that for granted.

And a lot of e-commerce these days are doing email, but they're not doing text.

You know, you can't stop with email.

You got to add in the text messaging.

We see better revenue from texting right now, assuming you collect enough phone numbers than we do from emails for e-commerce.

The other thing that we're seeing good e-commerce companies make is they're using tools like SurveyMonkey or using the video recording tools like the crazy X to figure out what's wrong with the pages and how to improve the checkout flows.

Good e-commerce companies also offer multiple payment options.

We typically see an 18%-ish increase in revenue when people add PayPal as a payment option.

Wow.

As well,

it's a big jump, though.

Yeah, but people love it.

They love clicking that button and it makes it easier.

And they have multiple

funding sources typically in their PayPal account.

And what's the best

app that they can attach to their stores for the texting marketing the marketing text

there's a lot of them I wouldn't actually say there's one that's better than others I would actually look at what e-commerce platform you're on and which ones fit natively and integrate with your CRM ideally you would want one that just plug and plays you don't want to just go and add a random one and be like, oh, it doesn't integrate and then we got to do everything manually.

Just like email software.

There's a lot of them, right?

It's the question of which ones integrate really nicely with your CRM, and you can just get everything done pretty quickly.

Neil, it's been a pleasure.

Any closing thoughts and where people can find you?

NeilPatel.com for my blog, or all my social handles are also Neil Patel or NP Digital for our ad agency.

Nice.

Wayne at the creator on Instagram, it should pop up here or here.

Sean Mike Kelly, Digital Social Hour.

Thanks for tuning in, guys.

I'll see you next week.