Neil Patel

According to his autobiography, he was born in England in 1985 and moved with his family to California in 1987.⁠[1]

As a teenager, he sold CDs and car parts, worked at Knott’s Berry Farm and sold Kirby vacuums. He later created the Advice Monkey job board and taught himself SEO after disappointing outsourced marketing.⁠[1]

While in high school, he took classes at Cypress Community College. A classroom presentation about search engines led to marketing consulting work for Elpac Electronics.⁠[1]

His collaborator Hiten Shah dates their founding of Crazy Egg to 2005. The product helps website operators understand visitor behavior through tools including heatmaps, recordings and testing.⁠[2][3]

According to Shah’s retrospective, they started KISSmetrics in 2008 to provide user-centered behavioral analytics in place of companies’ internally built systems.⁠[2]

The Northern California federal court approved the settlement in Kim v. Space Pencil. Plaintiffs alleged that the company, doing business as KISSmetrics, tracked users by circumventing browser privacy settings. It agreed to restrictions on the tracking technologies. The settlement provided no monetary relief to the class, and unnamed members retained their claims.⁠[4]

In a 2016 post, Shah announced their Quick Sprout software venture, using the name of Patel’s existing marketing blog. It aimed to help users improve content, traffic and conversions. They planned to self-fund while establishing product-market fit.⁠[2]

Marketing School, which he cohosts with Eric Siu, published its first episode, introducing the daily marketing podcast and discussing learning through blogs, practical experimentation and persistence.⁠[5]

Hustle, coauthored with Patrick Vlaskovits and Jonas Koffler, was published by Rodale Books in a 272-page edition. It addresses career and life choices through a framework combining personal goals, thinking and habits.⁠[6]

In a 2020 article, he recalled acquiring Ubersuggest for $120,000 in February 2017, intending to develop an SEO tool accessible to smaller businesses.⁠[7]

NP Digital’s official history records its founding by Patel and Mike Kamo in 2017 to provide digital marketing services. The website lists Patel as cofounder and Mike Gullaksen as CEO.⁠[8]

He explained that rising development, data and server costs led Ubersuggest to charge for additional projects, keywords and advanced data while retaining free features.⁠[7]

NP Digital announced its acquisition of AnswerThePublic, which uses search-engine autocomplete data to organize consumer questions. The acquisition was intended to expand Ubersuggest’s search insights and data visualization.⁠[9]

FTX-related debtors sued Patel and two affiliated companies to recover marketing-contract payments, asserting fraudulent-transfer, preference and knowing-assistance claims. The defendants moved to dismiss.⁠[10]

School of Hard Knocks published a profile summarizing his discussion with the School of Mentors community about market selection, client relationships, distinctive content and consistent long-term publishing.⁠[11]

NP Digital announced an agreement to acquire the UK app-marketing agency Yodel Mobile, expanding its London team and capabilities in app-store optimization, user acquisition and mobile-app consulting.⁠[12]

The Delaware bankruptcy court dismissed preference claims concerning the Big Deal and Earned Media transfers and denied the remaining dismissal requests. The order addressed whether claims could proceed, without finally determining Patel’s liability.⁠[10]

The show released an approximately 80-minute interview discussing differences between audience size and income, content businesses, AI’s effect on marketing and long-term business development.⁠[13]

According to NP Digital’s announcement, the company was named Performance Marketing Agency of the Year in the 2026 Ad Age A-List. The award recognized the agency.⁠[14]

Personal website: https://neilpatel.com/ (opens in a new window). X: https://x.com/neilpatel (opens in a new window). YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/neilpatel (opens in a new window). LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilkpatel/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1][15][16][17]