#861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies
Brian Dean is the founder of Backlinko and Exploding Topics, both acquired by Semrush, which itself was recently acquired by Adobe for $1.9 billion. Brian's story starts exactly where a lot of great stories start: broke, directionless, and eating canned beef stew in his dad's basement during the 2008 financial crisis. He picked up a copy of The 4-Hour Workweek and took action. As is nearly always the case, his path wasn’t a straight line, but a series of winding turns, all fed by experiments. His journey includes failures, two successful exits, and a hard-won answer to the question most people never think to ask: what do you actually do with your freedom once you have it?
This episode is brought to you by:
Incogni, which automatically removes your personal data from the web, helping shield you from fraud, scams, and identity theft: https://incogni.com/Tim (use code TIM at checkout and get 60% off an annual plan)
Fin powerful AI Agent for all your customer service: Fin.Ai/Tim
Timestamps:
[00:00:00] Start.
[00:02:53] From PhD pipettes to Dad’s basement to Jerry Springer.
[00:04:38] The 4-Hour Workweek finds its dream reader — marginal notes and all.
[00:06:04] First product flops, free traffic beckons, and SEO.
[00:07:40] The 200-domain AdSense empire.
[00:09:40] Dreamlining: From “escape the basement” to “3k a month in Thailand.”
[00:11:27] When Google’s Panda update slapped the internet (and Brian’s empire).
[00:12:32] Scared straight: Black hat to white hat via a hostel in Spain.
[00:17:55] Backlinko is born.
[00:19:50] The 200 ranking factors post: 25 hours of patent-digging, a million visitors.
[00:22:13] New rule: One post a month, 10x better than anything out there.
[00:23:02] Semrush comes knocking to buy his company — Brian ignores the email.
[00:24:02] Taking celebratory shots at Legal Sea Foods while wondering where the contract is.
[00:25:32] Due diligence hell: Hunting down ghosted freelancers and the contractor commandments.
[00:29:25] SEC market-close rules vs. Brian’s 10 p.m. bedtime.
[00:30:16] Post-acquisition: Hopping from one treadmill to the next.
[00:34:19] Backlinko on autopilot, boredom on full blast, and the chapter everyone skips.
[00:35:42] Exploding Topics: The paid newsletter mistake vs. the obvious SaaS play.
[00:38:41] Data-driven content and the ChatGPT user stats flywheel.
[00:41:00] Noah Kagan’s advice: Double down on what works — then 10x down.
[00:42:26] Ready, Fire, Aim — the litmus test for would-be founders.
[00:44:06] Startup costs: $500 for Backlinko vs. $90k to acquire Exploding Topics.
[00:47:29] How love and a Craigslist apartment scam in Berlin landed Brian in Portugal.
[00:48:48] Geoarbitrage still works — just don’t trust the 2007 pricing.
[00:50:20] Post-exit stress: Oura Ring at 2x baseline and the Algarve hard reset.
[00:52:21] Why founders who launch within a year of selling usually regret it.
[00:53:30] Tennis as the ultimate void-filler: Fun, fitness, community, and fresh air in one sport.
[00:54:31] The paradox of choice after exit: Structure, identity, and vertigo.
[00:56:52] Parting thoughts.
*
For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.
For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors
Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.
For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.
Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.
Follow Tim:
Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss
Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss
YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss
Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
How to bounce back as a maker with Josh Howarth
On this episode Abadesi talks to Josh Howarth, co-founder of Exploding Topics.
In this episode they talk about...
His early days as a maker and what he would change if he could do things over again
“It’s not the case that you build it and they will come. It took me two months to build and then I was like, now what? I hadn’t thought at all about marketing channels.”
Josh talks about one of the projects that he created at the start of his journey to becoming a maker. He worked on a website plugin that he had seen other people implement where you spun a wheel to see what kind of discount code you would get for entering your email.
He says that he didn’t realize how difficult getting distribution for the plugin would be and spent a lot of his time after releasing it reaching out to different people trying to get business to sign up. He achieved some revenue from it but it seemed to quickly fizzle out.
“You can usually tell pretty quickly whether it will work or not if you’re putting it out there for people to see. I probably should have quit sooner, like after two months instead of six on my previous project.”
He realized that he didn’t have any passion for the project and that it would have been better to work on something that he cared deeply about. In hindsight, he also realized that he spent too much time working on it when it was fairly clear that it would always be a slog to try to keep the revenue up.
“If the goal is to run your own business, you should go for a space that you’re interested in because someone else who is passionate about it will beat you in the end.”
The genesis and evolution of Exploding Topics and the lessons he’s learned through the process
“It’s 100 times easier to bootstrap a profitable online business if you ride one of these big market trends. You will grow with the opportunity and the competition won’t be too fierce either. That’s when I started to build a project that would spot these trends, to scratch my own itch.”
His experience with his previous project led him to research emerging trends that he could potentially build an online business out of. He did a lot of research and turned his research project into a web app when he realized that the results might be of use to other people as well.
“I didn’t intend for it to become a product in itself but I decided I had solved this problem for me, I may as well turn it into a web app and see if other people are interested in it.”
He started to post the project on the web with lists of the top trends that he was seeing at the time, which proved to be very interesting to people. One day his site was near the top of Hacker News when his database went down, leading him to scramble to upgrade to a paid solution before losing all the traffic that he was getting.
He explains what he learned and what he would have done differently with Exploding Topics if he was starting over again.
“You can feel it when you have something that people like and that is taking off. With the with the previous SaaS app it felt like I was pushing like a boulder uphill, but this thing was like snowball, everywhere I posted it people loved it and it just kept growing and growing.”
How writing updates kept him accountable as a solo founder and his advice for finding a co-founder you can work well with
“Make sure there’s a good co-founder fit, make sure that you know them and they’re going to bring a lot.”
Josh says that it was very gratifying to see people use Exploding Topics to create their own sites based on emerging trends. This was what he had hoped to do with his original project with the web plugin.
He says that it was important as a solo founder to write updates on Medium for his users. This encouraged him to make sure that he was making progress consistently on the site, because he needed to show his users and readers that he was always working on it. He also heard a lot of useful feedback from users who would use the site and sometimes even from people who were simply following his journey.
He ended up taking on a co-founder for Exploding Topics via the sale of his site. He explains what the most important attributes in a co-founder are and why he and his co-founder work well together.
“Writing updates and keeping people updated on your progress is fantastic as a sole founder because it keeps you accountable. It also helps to clarify your thoughts and direction. It helps to get support from other people who reach out to offer support, advice and guidance.”
We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. 😸