The Tim Ferriss Show - #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story, Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

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/TimTimestamps:[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-sponsorsSign 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/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. This is a shorter episode and by request. Many of you have asked for more four-hour workweek case studies. These are conversations with people who have read the book, applied it, and built lives and businesses that certainly I never could have imagined. Brian Dean is the focus of today's conversation and his 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 four-hour work week. You read it, which is not that uncommon. And then he took action, which is less common. As is nearly always the case, his path wasn't a straight line going from kind of bottom left to the graph to the top right, but a series of winding turns all fed by experiments. And he has learned a lot. He has done a lot. Today's episode covers geo-arbitrage, test. investing assumptions cheaply, building a muse, automating income, and also filling the void. That's a chapter that a lot of people skip over. His journey includes failures, two successful exits, and a hard one answer to the question that most people don't think to ask until it's kind of late

in the game. What do you actually do with more time once you have it? Good problem to have, but quality problems can still be pretty gnarly if you don't think about them in advance. Before we get to the conversation, a little more on Brian. Brian Dean is the founder of Back Alinko and Exploding Topics, both acquired by Semrush, which itself was recently acquired by Adobe for $1.9 billion. His work has reached millions of readers and has been featured in outlets like Forbes, Fast Company, Bloomberg, and The New York Times. You can find him on LinkedIn, Brian E-D-D-D-D-E-D-N, and you can find him on YouTube, at Brian Dean. And last but not least, a very special thank you to Elaine Pofeld for getting Brian's story on my radar. Elaine is the author of the million dollar one person business and more recently tiny business, big money. She is fantastic. You can also, if you want, search her name on tim dot blog and a couple of episodes that feature her will pop right up. So that all said, without further ado, please enjoy this four-hour work week, case study with Brian Dean. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

Can I answer your personal question? Now I would have seen an appropriate time. What if I could be out of this, I'm a cybernetic organism, living this year over metal end upscale. Me, Tim Ferriss Show. Brian, nice to meet you finally. Thank you for taking the time. Hey, great to be here. Brian, where should we begin?

I'm thinking maybe because the impetus for this. this is somewhat around the connective tissue of the four-hour work week. Should we just begin with how on earth you and the four-hour work week intersected? Maybe we start there? So it intersected at a really weird and sort of low time in my life where I had started a PhD program at Purdue and it was just overall not great experience. I went in gung-ho. I'm going to be a scientist and all this stuff. And then the hard reality of pipetting, in a lab and having an advisor, breathing down your neck was like, I can't do this anymore, I'm out. So my plan was to get a job because I had a degree. I was like, let me get a job as a dietitian.

Unfortunately, that didn't really work out, and I ended up in my dad's basement. What was the timing of this? This was what year, roughly? This was 2008. So I think the book was relatively knew that. Yeah, 2008, that would have been a year after publication, let's just say, and also not exactly the hottest job market for people who may not recall. It was a tough time overall because of the financial crisis. Totally unbeknownst to me as a, you know, go into graduate school, spending most of my time at bars drinking, the great financial crisis was like over my head. Never heard of it until I tried to get a job.

And suddenly it became very real, very fast. I was in my dad's basement, broke, no girlfriend, obviously. No real prospects. Like I'm just kind of lazily applying for jobs every morning and just sitting around and watching Jerry Springer in the afternoon. That's pretty much my day. And then one day I have an idea. I'm like, I should start something. I don't know where this came from. I'm like, I should start a search engine for nutrition questions. When people ask, like, how much vitamin C is in a carrot, it'll just give them the answer. This is like, basically what an L.O.M would do way before in someone

that's not remotely qualified to come up with something like this. So I was like, how do I start a business. I'd never crossed my mind before. I literally thought starting a business was like in the office when Michael Scott gives us lecturing. He's like, first, you need a building. So I'm thinking, this is this huge undertaking I'm about to do. So I go to the bookstore to find a book to help me get started. And I saw the four work week, grabbed it. And it just sort of spoke to me. What happened after that? I blew my mind. I read the book. I'm like, well, I could start a business. Like, it was just a crazy mind-blowing concept that someone has no. experience was totally broke, could start something. Not necessarily be a smash hit, but you

could start something. I just followed the book exactly as it was written. I literally had notes in the margins. You had those little Q&As at the end, or little steps at the end. I would make sure I wouldn't go past that page until I did everything. Oh, God, my dream reader. I was like, I'm not going to go at the next page until I'm ready, good and ready. I followed the plan and then created an e-book about nutrition, how to help your back pain with nutrition. And we have so much to cover. I know I'm cheating a little bit. So I think it's fair to say that your first attempt did not turn into the mega hit that you might have hoped. Turns out it's hard to get traffic or it can be hard to get traffic.

And if you don't have a budget for paid ads, well, I guess necessity is the mother of invention or at least learning. And I want to add a sidebar here, which is this is so fucking common. It is incredibly common that you basically have your sort of first love slash relationship. Seldom works out, but you learn a lot and that leads to something else. But tell us about kind of what you learned and how you adapted to that first experience. I spent all this time on creating a product that I thought was helpful. I thought was good.

And then it was like, now what? You know, how do you get people to actually see this thing? And like you said, Tim, there's paid ads, which wasn't really something that I could do, considering I was broke in my dad's basement, having dinty more beef stew for dinner every night, or so-called free traffic, which I was like, what, free traffic? How does that work? So, of course, I went all in on that. And eventually sort of stumbled on this thing called search engine optimization, which was like,

you can rank in Google and people who are searching for what you sell, you can get in front of them. And I was like, oh, I use Google. And I never really, like, understood that there was this whole world behind the scenes, like, figuring out how it works, trying to game the algorithm and stuff. And that sent me down the path of learning this thing called SEO. Also, I would say, just to pan a picture for folks, because I remember looking at this when I started my first, let's call it real business. Also, out of necessity, when everybody at the startup I joined got fired in 2001, not a great time for most dot-com companies. So I was working off of my soon-to-expire COBRA healthcare in California and eating also microwave dinners or I remember I had a couple of favorites at Jack in the Box, which was

in the parking lot of a Safeway. So that was my nutritional intake. Very similar, it sounds like, but slowly figuring out the mechanics behind these things that we use every day. And you took it certainly a lot further than I ever did. it's the Wild West. I mean, SEO can be, especially those days, kind of the Wild West.

So you built up a huge kind of portfolio of domains, it seems like, something like close to 200 or over 200. What was the game plan? When you started getting into SEO and then flashing forward, what was the sort of plan in terms of revenue generation? The idea was you'd have these one-page websites, site's rank, and then you'd have AdSense display ads on each of those. And back then, it was sort of a loophole that if you had a domain that matched the keyword exactly, then it was a massive advantage

in the search results. I would have like laurel shampoo.org, and I would just write like a thousand words about why Laurel shampoo is great, which obviously don't really know a lot about. And for those who can't see the video, we are both completely bald. Yeah. And yeah, putting AdSense ads on the pages times 200 and the idea is that you scale up enough and take a few steps later, you got a private island or something. You're right. That was the plan. Rough rough timeline. ABC dot dot, dot, M and then private island.

So let's backstep for a second because we can talk about the business and the business experiments and adventures, which we will and misadventures, aka panda death, which we'll probably get to. But if we're looking back to your reading of the book, there are a couple of different directions as a chooser and adventure map that you can take. And part of that oftentimes is figuring out your target monthly income, doing exercises like dreamlining,

which people can find for free to figure out exactly what it is that you are building as a lifestyle, and the things you want to do, et cetera, and you come up with this very precise, not necessarily accurate, but it's a starting point number. Where were you when you're going through all of this? Because you can build a business for the sake of building a business and generating all this cash, but then the question is, what do you do with that? How does it inform your life? Were you thinking about that stuff at the time? Or was it just get out of the basement and eat something besides more stupid? Yeah, it was getting out of the basement. Have a proper meal.

Exactly. Have a meal that's not out of a can. I just wrote that. And the whole dream, lining section that was basically that it morphed a little bit at first it was that and then building the 200 websites at some point i was in asia backpacking and then my whole world changed to 3k a month i was like if you can get 3k a month in thailand you can live like a king so my whole goal just became to get 3k a month passive income that was like my entire focus so it sort of shifted once i had sort of a lifestyle that i tried and liked i was like i could live like a backpacker i can do this so then it just became 3k a month for a long time for like a year. For a year. Did you hit the 3K a month before the Google slap, which may be one and

the same as the Panda Update? I'm not sure. Maybe those are two separate things entirely. But where were you before things got pretty strongly corrected? Yeah, it was made at 3K a month around there for like a couple months. I had a good ride and then it kind of got slapped. Didn't last one. The first was a Panda update. as you mentioned, which was a very content-focused update by Google. By Google. It was an update that basically was if your content is thin or repetitive or not helpful, we're going to wipe you out.

And it was like a one day they push a button and thousands of websites get completely obliterated, including mine. That's a rough. Where were you when this happened? Do you remember when you got the news? I got slapped twice. The first time didn't scare me straight enough. So I went back to the, I was like, oh, I'll just do a different type of black hat SEO and I'll get away with it. It didn't work. So that one, I think I was in Thailand when it happened.

Let's then go to the get scared straight as you put it. And you build your first as I think you've put it real site, which isn't thorial shampoo.org. It's something else. When you decided to hop to the white hat side of things, what did you end up doing and why? There was that first update and then a second update where I was in Spain in Granada and I went to my hostel. I checked the laptop and it was like again, it was like a repeat of the Thailand experience. Everything dropped. This was a different set of websites that got knocked out. And I was like, you know what? This is crazy.

Why am I doing this? This is an insane way to live. So then I was like, I'm going to build this one real website. And I was kind of inspired because there were these forums at the time with these marketing people and they're like spam, spam, spam. And there was always a there are a couple voices in there of people who were like. like build a real business. What are you guys doing? Build something real that's durable, that's not 100% reliant on Google. And I was kind of ignored those people. And then once I got hit that second time, I was like, okay, it's time to build something real. So I built a sort of real

site in the personal finance space, wrote real blog content, didn't do any shady, spammy stuff and tried to keep it on the up and up. What is the bridge or what happens between that and then building Backlinko. How do you end up segwang? I mean, I guess this could be like a very fast montage in the sort of fictionalized movie of your life. But what happened? To go from there to Backlinko, which ultimately you ended up getting acquired, what transpired between those two? So once this site started to get a little bit of traction, I was like, wow, this is a whole world I didn't know about. Real marketing. Why have SEO? And it was fun. It was working. And it was more enjoyable because I didn't have to look over my shoulder that I was going to get hit with an

update next week. And it was cool because I'm reaching out to other websites and like, oh, this is really helpful and they're linking to me. I'm not paying for links. They're just like naturally doing it. And I'm like, how do I learn more about this? Like this whole world opened up. How do I get better at this? And all the advice that I read on all these White Hat SEO blogs were vague advice, create great content, build relationships with other people, market your site in a... Yeah, lead with integrity. You're like, okay, what's my next step? Very unclear. Exactly. It was as vague as you can imagine. Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. Longtime listeners know how important privacy is to me. In fact, my friends

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That's f-in. com. Then Backlenko is a case of sort of creating the thing that you couldn't find. Is that, I guess, a fair way to put it? Yep. One thing that I saw here in the prep notes, which I was like, oh, that's so smart. And I wanted to highlight it is there are a number of things, obviously, that you ended up doing really well that seemed to have set the stage for a lot of things that came. One of them was digging through Google patents and engineer statements.

And I'll come back and sort of expand on why this is smart. But it'll probably become very obvious once you explain why you did it. Why were you digging through Google patents and engineer statements? Are those part of the patents? Or those something separate? Separate. Okay. So could you explain what you were doing? When I launched back Linko, I was like, there must be other people like me who are getting into this whole world of Oahuasio. They want to learn more about it and they're disappointed about what's out there. And it turned out there was, I just didn't know how to reach them at first. So I followed the same advice that I read for starting a blog, which was, you know, you need to publish every week or every other

day. And that's how you build an audience. You just publish and pray that people come. So that's what I did. People still give that advice. Publish and pray. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I did that and bang my head against the wall. And I was like, you know what? I came up with a actually creative idea for a post that would be really special instead of just the stuff I was putting out every week, which was good. It was definitely actually decent to give myself some credit. But it wasn't anything that. it's going to grab you by the shirt and be like, I need to read this. It was just slightly above average and what was out there. I was really going on that consistency play. Like if I do this consistently over time, there'll be like a secret society that will just

send me traffic as a reward for being so consistent. I didn't really have the whole thing planned out, to be honest, I just thought I just knew consistency equal traffic at some point. And it honestly didn't for me. So I had this idea for a post, which was Google recently had said that there's 200 ranking factors in the algorithm. So I was like, let's just try to find them. Obviously, a lot of it's going to be conjecture and guessing and speculation, but let's just do a list of 200 instead of the lists of 10 or 20 that I'd seen out there. And then I got to like 55. And I'm like, man, there's really, you have to really dig to find some of these. And that's when I went through the Google patents. And also people would interview Google engineers or they would

give statements about, they'd be at a conference and they would give a talk. And, you know, one of the slides would mention a ranking factor that they're considering. So it took a lot of digging. It took like 20 to 25 hours to complete this single post. And that's really why I was digging into all this stuff. I just want to add an addendum to that, which is people who have not heard of this approach. For some folks a bit, I or someone else has done that. But it is incredible what you can learn through reviewing patents and looking at very niche events, industry events, videos and transcripts of presentations. This was incredibly valuable when I was getting started as well, mostly looking at closed door or

very small event presentations and things like that. All right, so that was sort of a massive post that you really invested in. 25 hours, not trivial. That's a lot more, presumably, than you're putting into the kind of publish and pray consistent approach to just sliding a plate with like content salad out the door and hoping that, you know, a lepricons going to show up and trade for a bottle of gold, right? So what was the response to that post? Massive traffic and controversy, kind of everything you want in a piece of concept, to be honest. I mean, you had the traffic, you had people, the wow factor.

And then you had the controversy, which is like, those aren't Google's 200 ranking factors. You know, no one knows those. And then people saying, well, this is a wow. at least trying to come up with something and then people saying, well, it shouldn't do it. So there's like perfect little debate around it that was pretty lightweight. It's not anything super controversial, but just enough to get people's attention. So yeah, brought in, I mean, I would say I was probably getting like 150 visitors a month. That probably brought on a couple thousand when I first put it out.

It's brought a million since then. What did you then follow that up with in terms of lessons learned coming up with new rules for yourself in terms of how you were going to approach the business, how did that inform things going forward once you saw that response? I just threw out the whole playbook I was doing. Consistency thing. I would even have on Fridays,

I would have like a Q&A. I would just put five questions and answer them. And of course, I wasn't getting any questions, so I just completely made them up and then answer my own questions, just to have something to put out there. And I'm reading it.

I'm like, why would anyone want to read this? So then I just scrap the whole thing and was like, I'm just going to put out something once a month, And it's going to be the best thing on that topic's ever been written by 10x. And that was sort of how I totally changed my content focus to quality over quantity. You had a fun YouTube video on ultimately the acquisition of Backlinko. And I guess the original email you got was like, hey, we'd love to connect to like collaborate.

And you're like, well, that smells like every bullshit spam email I've ever received. So you just ignored it, right? as I remember. And we won't spend a ton of time on this, but what is Semrush? This is the acquirer, ultimately. But for people who don't know, what is Semrush?

They're a marketing platform that help you get better results from SEO, pay-click, and also now AI search. Are they private, publicly traded? They're publicly traded, right?

Yeah, it looks like on the New York Stock Exchange. by Adobe last year. So they will be part of Adobe, I think, sometime this year, when everything goes through. Got it. And they acquired you ultimately

while they were public. I mean, there's so many good aspects to this. Do you want to tell the story about flying to Boston? I mean, eventually this contact, I can't remember his name, but since you ignored the first email he wrote and basically said, hey, look,

might be interested in buying your company. Like, you'd be direct, and you're like, okay, I'll reply to that one. But you told the story of flying to Boston, I think it's pretty funny. I also liked in your video and you said, you know, up to that point, I hadn't sold anything except for maybe a used car. I think you said something like that. I was like, that's pretty good line.

Okay, so the first Boston trip, what happens there? Like, what's in your mind? In my mind, I'm like, we're going to close this thing. Let's go, go to Boston. It was really a meet and greet where the executive team just wanted to meet me and chat about how it could help them, how Backlinko could fit into their platform and their business. So I spend the day with them in the office. And then afterwards, we all go out to drinks to celebrate the deal.

And I'm like shitting myself, right? I'm like, what? We're celebrating the deal. Now, like, I never saw a contract or an agreement or anything. I'm like, we're going to sign it like tonight. So we go out and we're at Legal Seafood in the Prudential Center, taking shots. Yeah, this is great.

Right. This is going to be the best thing ever. And I'm thinking, where's the contract? When are we going to sign? Like, I really thought right there. Did I miss something? Did I black out? Exactly. I'm like, did I agree? Like, is it verbal agreement enough for a deal like this? So yeah, that was definitely, I was way off on that. It took two more months of due diligence after that meeting for the deal to actually close. You said two months.

Yeah, which for people who have never gone through it, I can be very challenging if you don't have your ducks in a row, which almost nobody does unless they've kind of been through this before or are venture-backed and they have kind of people overseeing all this stuff. Two months is pretty good. It's painful, but man, due diligence can go on forever. For people who are starting a company, maybe they never intend to sell it, but hey, you had not gone into Beclinco thinking that you were going to sell it, but they want to preserve the optionality. I remember coming across, and I haven't read it in a long time, but a book by John Warlow called Built to Sell, which talks a bit about this. And I thought it was actually very good,

like a very, I don't want to say basic, but pretty sort of foundational primer for some of this stuff. But what advice would you give to folks? I mean, one comes to mind, which I have also had to learn the hard way about independent contractors. But what are some of the tenets or sort of commandments of like, hey, just in case one day you want to sell this thing, here are a couple of things that I learned. Anything come to mind? Independent contractors, for sure. Maybe you can expand on that sim because you've experienced with that. If you ever want to sell something, the acquiring party is going to want to know with some assurance. And they'll have reps and warranties in the agreement that basically say, hey, if you miss something or you're not telling us the truth, like there's going to be a world of trouble and we'll probably be able to back out of the deal and take all the money back. But they want to know that everything they're buying is free and clear.

So if you've had, as I have and as you have in some cases, well, I'll just speak personally. always maintained a very small full-time team, but have used dozens and probably hundreds, certainly hundreds of contractors over the span of decades. And if you're building something and they want to see, they meaning the acquiring company, every single contract to make sure that someone isn't going to come out of the woodwork and say, hey, I own a part of that, hey, I contribute to this and therefore I am entitled to a piece of equity, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, which if the deal is big enough

come out of the woodwork, no matter what, you see this with a lot of tech IPOs and stuff. As soon as they file the S-1 getting ready to IPO, then some rando comes out of the woodwork and says, I'm the seventh co-founder and you're like, what? Like, no one's ever heard of this person. And they just want nuisance money to go away. That's the relatively short and sweet

on independent contractors. This is going to be true also with pretty much any agreement or contract. You just want to document, document, document, make everything formal. No verbal, no handshake. If you want to preserve the option to cleanly and hopefully relatively quickly sell a company later, anything else that you would add to that, Brian? If you don't have your finances in order, like you don't get P&Ls, that is something they obviously will care a lot about.

And luckily I had a good accountant that did that stuff. So that wasn't a big deal. The number one time sync for me was independent contractors. I mean, I'm like you. I hired so many people that created like a blog post image or something or like a social media image once for like 10 bucks. And I had to go try to find them. I have to hire almost like a private investigator to find these people because you don't even barely remember them. Even people that ghosted me. I had people that I paid like a deposit for a work and they never even replied. They totally ghosted me. And I still had to reach out to those people. Of course I'm not going to reply. But you have to show that. that you tried. And then obviously since this experience, every contractor that gets hired signs an ironclad agreement that says, you don't own any of this work. Once you're paid, it's a property of blah, blah, blah. That made things a lot easier the second time, but I had no idea this independent contractor thing was so important to the acquire, but it absolutely is.

Yeah. So we won't spend a ton of time on sort of what followed, but there was one funny anecdote about the public announcement. Could you just explain that? Given the time zone differences? I thought that one was great. Time zone differences, and I'm like early to bed kind of person. So they told me that, hey, Brian, you know, we're going to announce this tomorrow and we're going to announce it at 5 p.m. Eastern.

But, you know, and I'm like, oh, man, I don't know. Is it possible to send it earlier? That's like 10 p.m. here. I'm already kind of getting ready for bed. Basically, say, I'm in my PJs at that point. Is it possible to push this earlier? and they said, no, because it's a public company, due to SEC rules, we have to make these announcements after the market's close.

Yeah, I was so embarrassed. I was like, oh, yeah. I forgot the league I'm playing in here. So you sell the company, presumably there's some type of earn out or a period of time for which you're required to still work on Backlinko. Who knows what the exact terms are of that, but for people who've never gone to through it, right? You can have a vesting period. You can have an earn out where you get X percentage of the total purchase price based on hitting or exceeding X, Y, and C metrics or whatever.

So there's a period of time like that. Post acquisition, let's just say, because I know that was very stressful and you started grinding your teeth and that kind of evaporated as soon as the deal was done. Let's just flash forward like two or three months after the acquisition. What does your life look like? What does a week look like for you? It's honestly not that different because I had another startup that it was already working on. I was basically running on a treadmill, and then I just hopped onto another treadmill that was right next to it and just kept going. So there wasn't a whole lot of downtime to really reflect or analyze that one day that the announcement was made, especially the next day because it was

late here. So like the next day was really when I was sending messages to people and stuff and getting congratulations and whatnot. But after that day, I was pretty much back working on the next thing, didn't reflect too much. on it. So my life was more or less the same one day after. Looking back, are you basically like, hey, I'm a border collie. I need to work or I'm going to go crazy. So I'm glad I did that. Do you wish you had approached it differently? I kind of wish I approached it differently. Yeah. And looking back, I wish I took some time off. It's just tricky because you know how it is. When you have a startup, it's kind of a strange

situation. Like I had a new company that was growing. I had this old company that I sold. And it felt weird to say to the new team like, hey, guys, I need to reflect about how great my life is. I need to chill out. You guys still work, though. Like, you work your asses off. I'm going to still on the beach for a while. So it felt a little weird. I felt like I kind of had to go back into the trenches with them right away, almost even more so to prove like, look, I'm not done. Like, I'm not going to rest of my laurels. We're still in it to win it. And financially at that point, where you focused on the new company, topics because you wanted to get to that sort of big pot of goal at the end of the rainbow.

Like what was the driver behind that? I don't know to what extent you were sort of financially stable, had savings. We don't have to get into all the nitty gritty if you don't want to. But I'm just curious, what was driving the involvement in the new company for you? It wasn't really 100% financial. When I sold Backlinko, before then, I was probably okay from most of my life. Then when I sold Backlinko, it was like, okay, I'm probably good for forever. And then I wouldn't have probably started something else right away if I hadn't already. Towards the end of Backlinkos, when I was involved with it before I sold, I was honestly

getting a little bit bored with it. I was bored talking about the same things, writing about the same things, doing the whole course launch thing. And I kind of wanted something new. And I saw an opportunity where there were more trends than ever. And it was, I couldn't find a good tool for curating them. was like, here are all the trends in this space right now. There was Google trends, which is fantastic. If you know about a topic and you want to see how it's trending, but what about a trend

you've never even heard of? And that's sort of where I realized the opportunity was. So it wasn't really purely financial. It was more like, this is kind of exciting and new. I think it's a good opportunity as well. And it'll give me something to do between these sessions with Backlinko, which was, it was also boring because it was so optimized. I work like three hours a week. It was like four work week, honestly, at the end. It was getting so much traffic. on autopilot. The launches were really easy to do. Even courses were easier to create at the end because it just had it all down to a science. Even if it was a totally different topic, I knew exactly how to create a course. So the challenge wasn't really there. And this was like, okay, new challenge,

new space. It wasn't so much financial. It was more just to freshen things up and to try something new. Yeah. And you'd also already committed to other people with this new startup. So it makes a lot of sense. When you had with Backlinko so much on autopilot the three hours per week, what were you doing with the rest of that time? Because the most, and we don't have to dig into the book too much here, but if I had to point to one chapter that people pay no attention to, because typically they're like, oh yeah, that'd be a nice problem to have and they forget about it. Is the filling the void chapter? Filling the void chapter of the four hour week is really important so you don't go into like psychological free fall, among other reasons. But what were you doing with the rest of your

time if Becklinco at one point when the flywheel was really spinning was only occupying or requiring three hours a week. I was bored honestly. I wasn't filling it well. I wasn't filling the void. Going to the gym, reading books, playing video games. I think that was part of this and we, this boredom was I needed to reread that chapter essentially and fill this with something meaningful. And I think that's why I was seeking another startup project because I'm like, I need to Yeah. It was like, I need to work. I need to build something.

I'm not building this. I'm just maintaining it. So that's really what got me into exploring topics. So honestly, the filling the void chapter, the whole filling the void concept, I really only took seriously recently. But before then, I filled it with sort of nonsense, to be honest, and then started another startup. What were some of the things you did differently with exploding topics after all the

experience with Backlinko? And maybe things that in retrospect, you're like, wow, that was. a really smart decision and change, and maybe somewhere you're like, hmm, okay, lesson learned. We're probably, if I were starting from scratch with exploring topics, I would have done it differently. Anything come to mind in terms of good and quote-unquote bad decisions? Yeah, we can start with the bad one, which was how to monetize this site. I had this very strange idea that we're going to create this awesome free resource that anyone can visit and just see trends right away. They can filter. They can go by category.

and you think, oh, how you're going to monetize that? Logically, you think SaaS, an upgraded version of what they're seeing for free. And for some reason, I was like a paid newsletter. Like, let's create a paid newsletter. So we created this paid newsletter that was granted helpful in like objective terms, but not necessarily for that person who wants to see trends in their particular niche. So we would send them a trend on like some sort of face cream and then on like a car and then a battery and then a tech startup.

And they would be like, what is that? this. People were like, I want just trends about e-commerce. I just want trends about this one thing. Like, why are you sending me all this stuff? And then people would also sign up thinking it's SaaS, even though we said everywhere, like pay newsletter, paid news, and they'd be like, I thought this was SaaS. I thought this was SaaS. That was our number one complaint. And yeah, sometimes you just need to like get that bean over your head because I was like, oh, SaaS is so complicated. My co-founder was a coder, but I'm still like, oh, we're going to have to hire developers and I don't know anything about this whole world. And for people who may be listening, who don't

recognize the term. A lot of people will. But software as a service, think about Dropbox, maybe not the best example, but Dropbox is a great example. But with a lot of these products, there's a freemium version. There's a version that you get to use for free. And then if you want a bunch of additional storage or features or access, whatever it might be, then you pay $9.99 a month or whatever. And there's like the basic intermediate, advanced version, enterprise, etc. That's sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to define that. If you had told me that before we started, I would have been like, oh, logically, then we should have the premium advanced enterprise version in the back end instead of the paid newsletter idea. So that didn't really go well until we ultimately shifted to what we should have been in the first place.

So that was sort of the bad decision. The good decision was definitely investing in this data, publishing data early on. So with Backlenko, this is something I only discovered after like five years of running the site. And then with exploring topics, I was like, day one, we're going to publish tons of data. We're going to be the source. That's another strategy, like be the source of information on technology, software, e-commerce, trends, anything trend-related, we're going to be the source. We're going to have the latest data. We're going to have the best visuals, and we're just going to be the source for that information.

As opposed to writing how-to content, we really focused on data-driven content. Did it work right out of the gate? Or was there a formula that you realized worked after you had a particular? other well-received publication of data? It took a while to get going, a lot of mistakes, a lot of posts that weren't great, or the topic wasn't a good choice. What really helped us, what was the smash hit, were these very specific stats that people look for.

So what I discovered through this process was this stats page idea is nothing new. Like people write, you know, the biggest stats around the fitness industry or LinkedIn stats or whatever. And those are fine, but usually journalists aren't looking for LinkedIn stats or TikTok stats. Some of them are, and that's fine. But most of them look into something very specific, like how many users the TikTok have, or how many people use LinkedIn every day, like daily active users, or how many posts are on LinkedIn every day? Like, it's super specific.

So if you're able to find a credible stat around that, then you can crush it. Even if you're not the one that developed it. Like a lot of times, these are also buried in like PDFs or, white papers or again interviews that you have to pull out like one of our biggest smash hits in this area was how many users of chat chpt have granted we publish this early that's another thing that can help a lot if you publish one of the first or the first specific stats page then you get into the virtuous cycle where you're very visible when someone's searching for that topic then they link to you they mention you makes you more visible and then you just are like in this massive flywheel

So one of our best pieces was how many users has chat chpd have? And every once in a while, Sam Maltman will give a talk and he'll mention it or when they raise a round, they'll mention it. And all we did was just document their user growth based on these statements that they made. The initial post probably costs hiring a freelancer like $200. And then to update it every couple months, it was like another 50. And it's been referenced like 3,000 times. It's absolutely insane.

The effort to reward ratio is nuts on that. And of course, it's just like part of it is some pieces do better than others, but we've noticed that that formula tends to work well. If you can find a trending specific stat that bloggers or journalists are looking for when they write about that topic, they're very likely to reference you. So I read, I'll give credit here, this is on Growth Manifesto.com, found this doing research. You were interviewed towards the end of that interview by Alex. He asked you what the best piece of business advice was that you've ever received. Now, this may have changed and there's probably more, but it was Noah Kagan advising you to double down on what works.

Could you expand on that? And then I'm wondering if there are any other sort of mantras or short pieces of advice that you would also put on like the Mount Rushmore of your best advice that you've received. It sounds so simple, but it's one of those pieces of advice that's simple but hard to follow. Because when you're running a business, there's like a million things to worry about, to focus on there's new opportunities, new. challenges, other competitors, you have an employee that's sick. It's hard to really focus on like that little thing that works. I think this is especially important when you're first starting

out. Because when you're first starting out, nothing's working, almost by definition. Like, you're starting something new, at least in my experience, when I'm starting something new, I don't know, like nothing's working. And then when something does, most people are like, okay, that works. Now let's go with something else. But instead, you should just take that niche. It's almost like a little niche when you're rock climbing. Just take that niche and just double down, triple down, quadru. It should really be like 10x down on what works. It's so rare that you find something that works. And honestly, in most businesses, if you can find one thing that works and scale it up, that can get you pretty far. Aside from the four-hour work week, which was a catalyst of sorts in the

beginning, have there been any other books that stand out or resources when someone comes to you and they're like, I'm thinking about starting a business? I'd like to start a business. Are there any books or resources that you tend to recommend frequently? Yes. For people that are just like, I want to start a business and they're like, I don't know what to do, how to do it. They're like totally green. Then ready, fire, aim is usually the book that I recommend. You familiar with that one?

I've heard of it. Michael Masters or something. What leads you to recommend this book? It gets people into the action mindset, like a leaning towards action instead of analysis. I was guilty of this when I first started. doing a lot of spreadsheets and analysis and business cards, registering your company, all those things that you can do later that don't really matter. This gets you going on like the most important things. And then later you can always change course. But the key is really like starting,

starting, starting. Or like Paul Graham says, action produces information. So this is book will hopefully give people a kick in the butt to get started instead of analyzing and then being like, okay, now I'm ready. Just be like start today. And then. and change as you go. I feel like that book is almost a litmus test. If you read that book and at the end you don't do anything, then you're probably not ready. Yeah.

The whole point is to get started and it gives you advice on how to know you've got traction and what to do once you get traction. So I feel like if you just read the book and you're like, okay, what's the next book to read? It's probably not the best approach. So that book is hopefully the kick in the butt that someone needs. This might be a tough question to answer, but how would you define the startup costs for Backlinko and exploding topics?

Like in the first three months of those two companies existing, how much money was invested in each of those? Like how much money was required slash invested? For Backlinko's case, a few hundred bucks at the most. It was like domain, WordPress. I probably hired someone to create like a basic blog design theme. for WordPress. Don't remember how much, but like,

if I spend $1,000, I would say that's a lot. I was probably more like $500. It's a blog. I mean, really, at the end of the day, there shouldn't be a lot of costs involved with that. Exploing time is a lot different because I acquired like a prototype version from someone for $75,000 to start with.

That was part of their pay package as well. So just on day one, like I was in with that much. And then it was a redesign and a rebrand. adding more trends, hiring a couple of people to do some basic things. So that was probably more like 90,000, something in that range. But it was a unique situation because I, yeah, it wasn't built from scratch. It was acquiring someone. And then that was also paying for some of their time.

It was kind of like hiring them as part of the acquisition. And that was paid out over the course of a few months. So I'm not exactly sure how much would be like in that first couple months. But it was in that range. Why did you acquire something and what was the deal structure of the actual? acquisition. I acquired it because I was trying to build this exact thing myself and just stumbling and stubbing my toe over and over again. So I knew that there was an opportunity for this like trend. Like I couldn't even describe it very well. It was just,

you want to go to a website and just shows you trends in whatever niche you're interested in. And that sounds so simple, but nothing existed like that, believe it or not. And I hired someone to build something like that. And it was horrible. I used Reddit. So we'd look at subredits and we would see how many times a word was mentioned or something. We found nothing valuable. The signal to noise ratio was completely backwards. It was like for every 200 hits, one was like decent. And then one day someone forwarded me this random site, this guy started. And I'm like, no, this is exactly what I want. But it was even better than I had imagined. So then it reached out to him. And then the deal structure was buy it 100% straight up. Part of the acquisition cost

will be, you'll get paid that. And then on top of that, if it goes well over the first, I think couple months, then we can set up some sort of part-time deal. And if that goes well, we can do full-time. And he would be helping you throughout that entire period of time to determine, help you determine if it's going well or not. Exactly. And he was the coder and developer behind the original version. So he was best qualified to continue to work on it and improve it rather than hiring someone random to come in. It was his vision to start with. Then I said, If it goes well with full time for, I think, another month or so, we'll be co-founders on this thing.

The only rub will be, if you line up a lot of equity, then you're going to have to put money in to fund this thing. Or if you prefer that you get more cash, then you can just get a proper salary, and then I'll own most of the business. So that's what we did. He chose more money, and then he owned a part of as equity. How did you end up in Europe?

Love, to be honest. Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah, I mean, my wife, we met in Thailand, like many years ago, and then we moved to Berlin. This is actually a funny story, partially from the 4th of Workweek, because you mentioned Berlin as like this cheap place. So we're in Thailand looking at Craigslist and looking at all these apartments that are like palaces for 300 euros a month. And we're like, Tim was right. This is amazing. Like you can live like a kid in Berlin for nothing.

So as we're like flying there, we send out all these emails like, we're going to. And of course, it all scams. It's like, I'm lost. And I like, oh, I'm out of town. But if, and I lost my passport, but if you leave like this money into this Western Union, I'm like, oh, we show up to Berlin. We're in a hostel for like eight euros a night in a 12-bed hostel while we realize that this whole thing, all these ads were applying to is a scam.

No one uses Craigslist in Germany. So then we eventually found an apartment, lived in Germany. She's Portuguese. So we visited Portugal a number of times where we live there. And eventually it was like, we could freeze our asses off or we could live in the sun. So let's look at the sun. Yeah, that's how we ended up here. The thing about the four work week, right?

The principles and frameworks all still work. Obviously, some of the tech tools, since they were last updated in 2009, most of them are completely irrelevant. Probably not going to just go to my PC at this point, right, to access your home computer remotely to do the work you need to do. But the pricing examples obviously have changed, right, since it was first written in 2007, 2009. So the principle, the idea of geo-arbitrage and applying that to what you earn and how you pay contractors, employees, and then your sort of living expenses, it applies, but definitely for anybody who ends up picking it up, if you read that doing something in Buenos Aires costs A, B, and C, I would go online and fact-check that

because it's probably changed a little bit. Looking at all the questions I could possibly ask, I mean, what are other sort of lessons learned or things that you would like to share with folks? Could be about your journey, could be about mistakes along the way, really anything at all, because part of the value of these conversations

is that we can get into a lot of specifics that are omitted in the magazine profiles of people that end up reading like a list of highlights. And there's obviously a survivorship bias to begin with if people appear on magazine covers. I know that's an antiquated example to use. But what else would you like to share with folks or anything else you'd like to add

just about the journey? It's not over. It still goes. One thing was honestly that I've discovered recently that I wanted to share would be actually filling the void. I felt the void after selling exploding topics and how I was able to fill the void. Yeah, please.

So set the stage for you, like, I sold back Linko and then about two years later, sold exploding topics and were just kind of going full time. Not super crazy working all the time because I was fairly efficient, but still working all the time. And then went from that to like stop to zero. And a lot of people, I think they have this feeling of like listlessness, no direction, maybe a bit of depression. For me, the symptom was stress. I think I was wired for stress, not only just in general, but also because of the sale process is stressful. And then just because the sale is done, your body and I think part of your reptilian brain

doesn't really recognize that. And it's looking for threats and it's looking for opportunities and it's just not chilled out. So I struggled for like two months with stress on my aura ring. My stress was like 2X baseline from after I sold. and you think it'd be the opposite. You're like, this is great. Like, I sold two companies.

I'm good for the rest of my life. Like, what is there to be stressed about? And then I realized what I needed was a hard reset. That was the first step. We went on a trip, got away from the environment, got away from the day-to-day life. And then it somehow was able to hack my brain to be like, okay, you're safe or like, things are chill now. So when I went back home, the stress was gone. It was like back to baseline.

or below baseline. What was the trip? It was a trip to the south of Portugal, to the Algarve. Yeah. So went to the beach. Nice oranges. Yeah. Toasty.

Yeah, good orange. Depending. Yeah. Good orange. Yeah. Yeah. So spent some time down there and that was just like the hard reset. I think you're just going to get out of your environment.

But then when I got back, it was like stress is gone, but now feeling a little bit bored. Like that boredom was coming back. And I was tempted to start another start. up. And I read this, someone sent me this, another friend who had a big acquisition. He sent me this thing by, I think it was Harvard Business Review, and it was the interviewed founders that had just exited and they asked them their advice. What was it like? What were the good ups and the downs? And they basically said, when you sell, there are like psychological dangers that can occur. One is that you lose your sense of structure. The other is you lose your sense of purpose and you

lose your sense of connection with your team. It all goes away. Like you have it and then one day you literally don't. So different people react to it in different ways, but they warned that a lot of case studies in this paper were saying people that started companies within a year of selling, usually regretted it. Take a year and don't make any major commitments whatsoever. So that's what I did. It kept me from starting these, I had all these ideas. I'm going to start a start and then I'd be like going to wait a year, wait a year, wait a year. And then by the time a year came around, I didn't really want to because I was able to fill the void largely with tennis. For me, tennis has been it just one activity fills almost all of these checks all of the boxes and fills this void.

It's amazing, man, because if you think about it, like if you want to have fun, you play video games or watch TV or something, if you want to have socialize, you go out drinking. If you want to exercise, you go to the gym. If you want to get fresh air, you go for a walk. Tennis is all these things, like in one activity. And if you want a community, you need to like, actually don't even know how to do that outside of tennis. That was the thing that changed was what I joined a tennis club. And there's a lot of other entrepreneurs there. A lot of Americans, man. It's like the 51st state over there, to be honest. It's getting a little crazy. But anyway, so I filled the void with this community of people that are playing tennis, trying to improve, obsessed with the game,

like watching YouTube videos, reading about it, practicing all the time. And now I don't have that same sense of like wanting to start something new. I love that. And just a few observations since, as you'd imagine, since the book came out in 2007, I've had the opportunity to sort of vicariously watch a lot of people grapple with this and having worked with so many startups in angel investing, granted in a kind of venture-backed environment. But a lot of the challenges are the same.

Whether you're coming out of, for instance, I know guys in special operations, if you're coming out of running a company, if you're coming out of starting and running a company, when you lose, as you put it, and I really liked the categories you mentioned, right? When you lose the structure, when you lose, in a sense, the identity, when you lose the connection to team, you can end up with a severe degree of vertigo and a very precarious paradox of choice. And something like tennis, and some people listening might think, like, what, tennis? Even if it's not the forever solution and the end-all, be-all, what it does,

just like getting your recommended daily allowance of essential amino acids and vitamins and so on, you're getting just enough that it provides you with the psychoemotional health and space to think about things more clearly instead of being reactive. You know what I mean? Like, you're getting enough of all of those things, and it provides you with a buffer and a certain equilibrium that allows you to think about things more clearly. And furthermore, this is not necessarily a problem you have to solve after everything vanishes, right?

you can think about this in advance and experiment with things so that when you have a real phase shift, which in the context of the 4-hour work week isn't necessarily selling a company, it's just like once you get it to a high degree of automation where it requires two, three hours a week, if that, to manage, which is more common than people might think, what you do at the rest of the time is a tremendously big question. So I love that. It makes me want to go back to the Algarf also. Can get a little toasty. Could be worse.

Yeah, it's a good country for tennis. If it's possible for you to find that that Harvard Business School piece, that HBS piece, would love to put it in the show notes. I am sure that we can track it down one way or the other, but we'll put that in the show notes for folks who want to check it out. Yeah, it's a great read. It might have been Yale or something.

I'll find it. Yeah, whoever it was. Brian, this has been super fun. Where would you like people to find you online? If anywhere. Let's start with YouTube. So that would be the first place, and then LinkedIn. At Brian Dean on YouTube and at Brian E. Dean on LinkedIn.

That other Brian, he must have grabbed that one. Brian, is there anything else you would like to say before we wind to a close? This has been great. Thanks, man. I know it's late. Several time zones away, and I appreciate you. flexible on the timing. So thanks so much for taking the time. Everybody listening or watching, we will link to everything we discussed in the show notes, as usual, at tim.blog slash podcast.

And until next time, as always, be just a bit kinder than as necessary to others and also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet Friday. enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend. Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading,

book some reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, Tim. blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

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with an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau. And with their unlimited plan, if you find your info on a site they don't monitor, send them the link and their privacy team will handle it. Go to incogny.com slash tim, I-N-C-O-G-N-I-com slash Tim, and use code Tim at checkout to get 60% off of an annual plan. one more time incogny.com slash tim.