Neil Patel, as his tagline goes, is kind of a big deal. He’s the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and KISSmetrics along with helping major companies such as Amazon and NBC grow their revenue. He’s been ranked as one of the top Internet marketers in the world. Inspired by his success, I recently signed up for his Advanced Marketing Program to increase traffic and conversion on my new site.
I launched Bumble Brain Box about 4 months ago and quickly found out that getting people onto my site is just the start. There’s a whole science behind what happens once a user lands on my homepage, and it was then that I entered the world of conversion rate optimization.
CRO and marketing is where Neil Patel has built a legacy, so I was blessed with the opportunity to jump on a call with him where he shared the biggest mistake ecommerce sites make and what he thinks can make or break a startup in its first year.
“The biggest mistake that I see from companies and people is that people make decisions purely off their gut like ‘oh, I want this color scheme’ or ‘this is the messaging we should use.’ They’re not using qualitative and quantitative data,” said Neil. “Quantitative being numbers and qualitative being information like surveys and feedback from customers.”
When he said this, it confirmed what my husband had been saying to me for weeks about my qualitative decision-making in regard to our site. I laughed to myself as I realized this and asked Neil, “So, what do you think is what makes or break a startup in its first year?”
He didn’t hesitate for a second. “Slow execution and not learning from your mistakes,” he said. Neil is extremely transparent about sharing his mistakes from the past, including both his successes and failures. He makes it a point to learn from every move he makes.
“I would go do it on my own, learn from my mistakes, keep rinsing and repeating. That’s really how I learned everything,” he said, and if he could go back and give himself advice when he launched his first site, he said, “It would be to focus more. With my first website, I tried doing too many things at once instead of focusing on just one aspect.”
Now, he shares these lessons and more from a decade’s worth of experience in his Advanced Marketing Course. He’s also celebrating the launch of his new book Hustle today!