Mike Kamo is Co-Founder of NP Digital, the performance-marketing agency he built with Neil Patel after leaving his family's San Diego Mazda dealerships. He also serves as CEO of Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic, and is the operating founder voice behind a bootstrapped agency that public materials place above $100 million in revenue with hundreds of employees across dozens of countries.
Eight Years at Mazda Dealerships
Kamo is a San Diego native who went into his father's Mazda dealerships straight out of school instead of college. In an Opt Out Life podcast, he said he spent about eight years in the car business and rose to running a dealership, working long days and weekends, before deciding he did not want that life permanently.
He described sitting down with his father, who surprised him by supporting the exit and saying he did not want his son stuck in the same grind into his sixties. Walking away meant leaving a multimillion-dollar inheritance path in his mid-twenties for an unproven marketing partnership.
Pitching Neil Patel
Kamo was already friends with Neil Patel when he proposed monetizing Patel's personal brand. After roughly a year of conversations, Patel agreed to let him travel to conferences and learn digital marketing while they figured out a partnership. Early money came from producing infographics for Patel and for clients such as GetResponse, then from routing Patel's inbound leads to outside agencies, a model they later dropped because brand complaints were too costly.
They next built a large online marketing course sold through an evergreen webinar. Kamo has said the first course held roughly forty modules and hundreds of hours of video, and that at its peak the funnel did on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars a month before they shut it down to point all traffic at agency work instead.
Bootstrapping NP Digital
Kamo and Patel co-founded NP Digital in 2017, starting from a small WeWork office with no outside funding. Kamo's site now describes an agency scaled past $100 million in revenue and about 800 employees across 30 countries, plus CEO seats at Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. Ad Age recognition for the agency sits beside that operator story.
In LinkedIn posts he still frames the path as car-business operator to agency builder: hire people who already know the job, keep fulfillment under the brand rather than farming it out, and treat the course years as the bridge that funded a real company.