Everyone these days talks about
how they're making millions of dollars.
They're flying in private jets, they're driving Ferrari's,
but you know what?
That's a bunch of bullshit.
For all those people that are making money,
they've made mistakes and probably have lost
millions and millions of dollars.
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel and today
I'm gonna share with you, how I lost a million bucks
by the time I was 21 years old.
(soft music)
I don't really discuss my personal life online.
You see me discussing a lot of business stuff,
but this is one of the first times I'm gonna open up,
and discuss one of my own personal stories.
I had an Ad agency when I was 16 years old.
I learned internet marketing on my own
because I got ripped off from other agencies.
They couldn't do one simple thing,
which was rate me on google.
And yes, that is really hard right now,
but when I was 16 years old,
that was one of the easiest things to do,
and I was paying thousands of dollars to people
who could have even added keywords to my own website.
Eventually I had to learn it on my own,
and I got good at it, but from there
I learned that I hated being a consultant,
so I decided that I wanted to create a company,
and you know what this company did?
It was so revolutionary.
At least right now you may think it is.
It's Cloud computing, but back then
there really wasn't any cloud computing solutions.
No I'm not saying that I deserve the credit
for the cloud computing category,
cause I really didn't do shit.
I had an idea, I invested over a million bucks into it.
I lost it all, and it failed.
And I'm gonna share with you, the main reasons
on why I lost that million dollars and what you should avoid
so you don't lose money like I did.
So the first thing that I ended up learning was
ideas are a dime a dozen, but it's all about execution.
The idea for cloud computing, cause I was like, "Wait,
I'm getting all this traffic from the social web,
why is it that I have to keep buying all these servers?
Why can't I keep scaling up and down
and be way more efficient and costly, right?"
So, I wanted to create a system
where all these servers were combined together,
and everyone would share server resources.
As you can see with companies like
Amazon Web Services,
and they're doing brilliantly well.
But, here was the thing,
the idea was amazing,
but the people that I was working with,
who claimed to know all about hosting and cloud computing,
they weren't executing.
Because they weren't executing, nothing ever got done
and the business never launched.
And I have a question for you,
and you tell me what you think the answer is.
How much money do you think you can make
from a company that never releases?
Zero
The second reason is I picked the wrong people.
These people weren't scrappy.
They were used to working in the corporate world,
like at companies like Microsoft,
and you know what happened?
And there's nothing wrong with Microsoft,
or google executives or employees,
but a lot of times they're used to doing things
in a really expensive manner.
They want to spend spend spend,
but that's not the reality.
You can't just keep spending money.
You gotta make it as well.
And these guys wanted all the best solutions,
like we had big servers, and racks from some micro systems.
They didn't want to use co-locations, they're like
"We need to create our own centralized location,
and get our own bandwidth and pipeline
and all this kind of fancy stuff,"
and that was where a lot of the fixed cost came,
and I was sending money for my hard-earned business
every single month.
So much so, that when I say I lost a million bucks,
I technically lost more than a million bucks.
I lost a million bucks of borrowed money,
not investor money, borrowed money
which means I had to pay it back.
And what's crazy is I paid it back in less than a year,
but that's a totally different story.
I don't want to go into how I made money,
cause I hate talking about how I make money,
but you know what?
If you guys leave likes and comments
and I get over a thousand likes, I'll share with you
on how I made a million bucks in less than a year.
The next tip that I have for you guys is
time is money, execute as fast as possible.
You know what, you're gonna have competitors.
I don't care if you have them right now,
the question is just when.
So if you can execute and stay ahead of the competition,
you're gonna be much better off.
There's a thing, the person who's the first to market,
is much more likely to do better
because they're getting all the press, the branding.
So execute as fast as possible.
The other reason that I lost a lot of money,
is I was in over my head.
I didn't pay attention to other people around me.
See, similar to me, you're surrounded by people.
My parents were giving me advice.
I'm like "Mom, Dad,
you don't know what you're talking about,
I'm not gonna listen to you."
I'm like "I'm gonna keep funding this
and putting in more money."
My parents are like "You're crazy,
you're just gonna lose all your money."
And I kept borrowing more and I kept losing more.
They were right.
I was getting feedback from entrepreneurs
and I was ignoring all the people who were around me.
I was too in it.
If you're getting feedback from people around you,
even if they don't understand the business,
they do understand human interaction,
emotions, psychology, right?
Because they're here on this earth interacting
with thousands, if not millions of people.
So when they give you advice,
I'm not saying you have to take their advice,
but you should consider it.
And if you consider their advice,
then what you'll see is you may make less mistakes.
And they last thing I have for you is,
learn from your mistakes.
When these guys kept making mistakes,
I kept being like "alright, that's fine"
and they didn't learn from them,
and they kept making them over and over and over again,
and I didn't say anything.
But if people or you can't avoid making the same mistakes
over and over again
how are you gonna learn and ever succeed?
You need to make the right decisions,
and the right moves to make money.
That's how I lost a million dollars.
And as I mention, if you guys like this video,
and I get over a thousand likes
and you guys comment and share it,
I'll release a video sharing
how I made my first million bucks,
what you can learn from it,
and how you can do the same, too.
So I'm gonna be creating more videos like this.
Make sure you subscribe, follow my page,
and I'll be here over the next few days
teaching and hand holding you
and making sure you're succeeding
through your entrepreneur journey,
and getting more traffic to your website.