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

0:00 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris 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.

0:34 during the two thousand eight financial crisis. He picked up a copy of the four hour work week, he 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 of 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, testing 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?

1:20 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. So before we get to the conversation, a little more on Brian. Brian Dean is the founder of Back Linco and Exploding Topics. Both acquired by SERush, 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. Dean, that's B-R-I-A-N.

1:56 Middle initial E, last name Dean, D E A 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.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. Optimal minimal.

2:30 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. So then I'll do a personal question. No seem. I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. Me So

2:53 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

3:03 the impetus for this is s 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.

3:16 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 uh overall not a great experience. I went in gung ho, I'm gonna 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.

3:39 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?

3:52 This was two thousand and eight. I think the book was relatively new though. Yeah, two thousand eight. 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

4:10 going to 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

4:28 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 uh

4:45 A search engine for Nutrition questions. When people ask like how much vitamin C is in a carrot, it'll just give them the answers. This is like, Basically what an LLM would do way before and someone that's not remotely qualified to come up with something like this. So I was like, how do I start a business? I had never crossed my mind before. I literally thought a business was like In the office when Michael Scott gives us lecturing he's like first you need a building.

5:10 So I'm thinking this is a huge Undertake 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?

5:23 It blew my mind. I read the book. I'm like well I could start a business like Уже красима концепт сама сперє. was totally broke, could start something. Not necessarily be a smash ship, but you could start something. I just followed the book exactly. As it was written.

5:41 I literally had notes in the margins, you had those little Q and A's at the end of a little Steps at the end, I would 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 gonna go to the next page until I'm ready, good and ready. I followed the plan and then

5:59 created an ebook about nutrition, how to help your back pain with nutrition. Mm-hmm. And we have so much to cover. I I know I'm cheating a little bit. So I think it's fair to say that your first attempt Did not.

6:13 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

6:25 I guess. necessity is the mother of invention, or at least learning. And I want to sp at a sidebar here, which is this is so fucking common. It is incredibly common that you basically have like your uh sort of first love slash relationship. Seldom works out, but you learn a lot and that leads to something else. But

6:46 Kind of. What you learned. And how you adapt it. 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?

6:57 You know, how do you get people to actually see this thing? Mm-hmm. 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 D Morby stew for dinner every night.

7:11 Or So called free traffic, which I was like, what free traffic? How how does that work? So of course I like 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've used 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.

7:39 Also, I would say Just to paint 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 two thousand, two thousand one. 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

8:06 I remember there was 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, kinda the Wild West. So you built up A huge kind of portfolio of

8:36 Domains, it seems like. Something like Close to two hundred or over two hundred. What was the Game plan. When you started getting into SEO.

8:46 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 rank and then you'd have AdSense display ads. On each of those. And

9:01 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 L'Oreal Shampoo.org. And I would just write like a thousand words about why L'Oreal shampoo is great, which I obviously don't really know a lot about. And for those who can't see the video, we are both completely bald. Yeah

9:26 And yeah, and then putting ad sense adds On the pages times two hundred, and the idea is that you scale up enough. And A few steps later. You got a private island or something. Right. That was the A B A A B C dot dot dot M and then private island.

9:44 So Let's back step 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

9:59 If we're looking back to your reading of the book. There are a couple of different directions as a chooser and adventurer. 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

10:22 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? Right. How does it Inform your life.

10:43 Were you thinking about that stuff at the time? Or was it just get out of the basement, need something? Yeah, it was too have a proper meal. Yeah, exactly. Have a meal that's not out of a can. So I just wrote that in the whole dreamlining section. That was basically what I wrote. 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 three K a month. I was like if you can get three car a month in Thailand, you can live like a king.

11:10 So my whole goal just became to get three K 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, Oh, I could live like a backpacker. I can do this. So then it just became three K a month. For a long time, for like a year. For year. Did you hit the three K a month?

11:29 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 uh strongly corrected.

11:44 Yeah, I was maybe a three K a month around there for like a couple of months. I had a good ride in that. It kinda got got slapped. Tim last one. The first was a panda update.

11:54 As you mentioned. Which was a very content focused update. Bite Google. By Google. It was an update that basically was if your content is thin or repetitive or not helpful, we're gonna w wipe you out. And it was like a one day they push a button and

12:08 You know, thousands of websites got completely obliterated, including mine. That's a rough Where were you when this happened? Do you remember When you got the news.

12:19 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 uh you get scared straight.

12:35 As you put it. And you build your first, as I think you've put it, real site. Which isn't. L'orchampoo. It's something else. When you decided to hop to the white hat side of things, what did you end up doing and why?

12:50 There was that first update and then a second update where I was in Spain and 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 is 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.

13:08 So then I was like, I'm gonna 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 of voices in there of people who were like, Build a real business. What are you guys doing? Build something real that's durable, that's not a hundred percent rely on Google. And I was kind of ignored those people. And then once I got hit that second time, I was like, Okay.

13:32 It's time to build something real. So I built A sort of real site in the personal finance space. R real blog content didn't Do any shady spammy stuff and try to keep it on the up and up. What is the bridge or what happens between that

13:47 And then Building back Linko. How do you end up Segwang. I mean, I guess this could be like a very fast montage in the sort of a fictionalized movie of your life. But what happened?

13:59 to go from there to backlinko, which ultimately you ended up Getting acquired. What transpired between those two? So once a site Started to get a little bit of traction.

14:10 I was like wow, this is a whole world I didn't know about. Real marketing, why ha SEO. Like 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 gonna get hit with an update. Next week. And it was cool because I'm I'm reaching out to other websites and like oh this is really helpful and they're linking to me.

14:28 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. I'm like, how do I Get better at this. And all the advice that I read on all these white hat SEO blogs were vague advice, great, great content. Build relationships with other people. Market your site in a

14:48 Yeah. Yeah. Lead with integrity. You're like, Okay, what's my next step? Very unclear. Exactly. It was as vague as you can imagine. I 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 would call me paranoid, or they used to call me paranoid, and now they think I was just depression in a sense. These days, you may have noticed, it is a lot harder.

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17:55 Then backlinko is a case of sort of Creating the thing that you couldn't find? Is that exactly 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

18:10 There are a number of things, obviously, that you ended up doing Really well. that seem 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

18:26 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?

18:41 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 Way Hasio. They want to learn more about it and they're disappointed about what's out there. And it turns out there was

18:54 I just didn't know how to reach them at first, so I'd follow 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.

19:11 Yeah, exactly. So yeah, that I did that and banged 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's gonna 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. It just

19:45 Th I just knew consistency equaled 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 two hundred ranking factors in the algorithm. So I was like let's just

19:58 Try to find them. Obviously a lot of it's gonna be conjecture and guessing and speculation, but let's just do a list of two hundred instead of the list of ten or twenty that I'd seen out there. And then I got to like fifty 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

20:20 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's like 20 to 25 hours to complete. This single post. And that's really why I was digging into all this stuff. That's fine. Add an addendum to that, which is

20:37 People who have not heard of this approach. For some folks like I or someone else has has done that, but it is incredible what you can learn. Through. Reviewing. Pants. And looking at very

20:49 Niche. Events, industry events for videos and transcripts of presentations. This was incredibly valuable when I was getting started as well, mostly looking at closed event presentations and things like that.

21:06 Alright, so That was sort of a Massive posts that you really Invest it in. Twenty five hours not trivial. That's a lot more, presumably, than you're putting into the kind of publish and pray.

21:20 Consistent approach to just Sliding a plate with like content salad out the door and hoping that you know a leprechaun's gonna show up and tr and trade for a five gold, right? So What was the response? To that post. Massive.

21:35 Traffic and controversy, kind of everything you want in a piece of content, to be honest. I mean, you had the traffic, you had people wow the wow factor. And then you had the controversy, which is like those aren't Google's two hundred ranking factors. You know, no one knows those. And then people saying, Well, this is 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. Now it's not anything super controversial, but just enough.

22:02 To get people's attention. So yeah, brought in, I mean I would say I was probably getting like a hundred and fifty visitors a month. That probably brought in a couple of thousand. When I first put it out. It's brought in millions since then. What did you then

22:15 Follow that. up with in terms of lessons learned. Coming up with new rules for yourself in terms of how you're 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.

22:31 Consistency thing. I would even have on Fridays, I would have like a QA. 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 them, answer my own questions. Just have something to put out there. And I'm reading it. I'm like, why would anyone want to want to read this? So then I just scrap the whole thing. And was like I'm just gonna put out something once a month. And it's gonna be the best thing on that topic's ever been written by Ten X. And that was sort of how I totally changed my content focus to

23:01 Quality over quantity. You had a fun YouTube video. On ultimately The acquisition of back link up and I guess the original email you got was like, Hey, would 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 ignore it, right? As I remember. And we won't spend a ton of time on this, but what is Semrus.

23:26 This is the acquirer, ultimately, but For people who don't know. What is SEMRush? There A marketing platform.

23:36 That help you Get better results from SEO Paper click. And also now AI

23:43 Search. Are they private, publicly traded? They're publicly traded, right? Yeah, it looks like it's a good idea. Last year. So they will be part of a Dob I think Sometime this year, when everything goes through.

23:56 Got it. And they acquired you ultimately while they were public. Pick up. 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

24:11 Since you ignored the first email he wrote and basically said, Hey, look, we might be interested in buying your company. Like can we be direct? And you're like, Okay, I'll reply to that one. But he told the story of flying to Boston. I think it's pretty funny. I also liked in your video when 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 a 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 gonna 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.

24:50 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 gonna sign it like tonight.

25:05 So we go out and we're at legal seafood in the financial center. Taking shots. Yeah, this is great, Brian. This is gonna be the best thing ever. And I'm thinking Where's the contract? When are we gonna sign? Like I really thought right there, they're gonna do that. Did I black out? Exactly. I'm like, did I agree? Like is a verbal agreement enough for a deal like this? So yeah, that was uh definitely I was way off on that. It took two more months of due diligence. after that meeting for the deal to actually close.

25:33 You said two months. Yeah. Which for people who have never gone through it. That 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.

25:47 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.

26:00 you had not gone into backlinko thinking that you were gonna 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, Tim, because you've experience with that.

26:42 If you ever want to sell something, the the acquirty 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.

27:11 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.

27:24 Every single contract to make sure that someone isn't gonna come out of the woodwork and say, Hey, I o own a part of that. Hey, I contribute to this. And therefore I am entitled to a piece of equity. Yada yada yada yada. Which

27:39 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 one 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.

28:09 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 L's.

28:24 That It's something they obviously will care a lot about, and I Luckily I had a good accountant that did that stuff, so that wasn't a big deal. The number one time sink for me was the independent contractors. I mine I'm like you I hired so many

28:37 People that created like a blog post image or something or like a social media image once for like ten bucks. And I had to go Try to find them. Have to hire like almost like a private investigator to find these people'cause you don't even barely remember them.

28:52 Even people that ghosted me. I had people that I paid at like a deposit for a work and they never even replied. They totally they ghosted me. And I still had to reach out to those people. Of course they're not gonna reply, but you have to show that You tried and then obviously since this experience Every contractor that you know gets hired signs an ironclad agreement that says You don't own any of this work, once you're paid.

29:16 It's a property of blah blah blah. That made things a lot easier the second time, but I 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 uh just explain that Given the time zone differences. I just I thought that one was great.

29:40 Time zone differences and I like I'm like early to bed. Kind of person. So they told me The hey Brian, you know, we're gonna announce this tomorrow. And we're gonna announce it at five PM Eastern but Yeah, and I'm like, Oh man, I don't know.

29:53 Is it possible to send it earlier? That's like 10 pm here. I'm already kind of getting ready for bed. Basically saying 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 markets close. Yeah. I was so embarrassed. Oh yeah. Right. I forgot the like the league I'm playing in here.

30:15 So You sell the company Presumably there's some type of burnout or period of time.

30:23 for which you're required to still work on back link co. Who knows what the exact terms are of that, but for people who've never gone through it, right? You can have a vesting period, you can have an earnout where you get X percentage of the total purchase price based on hitting or exceeding X, Y, and Z 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 start 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

30:57 that different because I had another startup that I 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'cause it was late here. So like the next day was really when I was

31:20 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.

31:31 So my life Was more or less the same one day after. Ha ha. Looking back, are you Basically like hey, I'm a border collie, I need to work or I'm gonna go crazy. So

31:43 I'm glad I did that. Do you wish you had approached it differently? I kinda 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 a new company that was growing. I this old company that I sold

32:01 And it felt weird to say to the new team like, Hey guys, I need to reflect and About how Great, my life is, I need to chill out. You guys still work though. Like you wipe your asses off. I'm gonna sit on the beach for a while. So it felt a little weird. I felt like I kinda 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 gonna rest on my laurels. We're still in it to win it.

32:23 Mm-hmm. And Financially at that point. Were you focused on the new company, exploding topics because you wanted to get to that sort of Big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Like what was the driver

32:39 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.

32:52 It wasn't really a hundred percent financial. Like when I sold back Linko. Before then I was Probably okay from most of my life. Then when I sold back Link out, it was like okay, I'm probably good for Forever and then I wouldn't have

33:05 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 kinda wanted something new.

33:21 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 that 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

33:42 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 Back Linko, which was It was also boring'cause it was so optimized. Like I work like three hours a week. It was like four hour work week, honestly, at the end. Yeah.

33:58 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 I 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.

34:19 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 Backlink goes so much on autopilot. The three hours per week. What were you doing with the rest?

34:34 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 like forget about it is the filling the void chapter. Filling the void chapter for our work 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 backlinko at one point. When it the flywheels was really spinning.

35:01 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

35:16 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 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, uh the filling the void chapter, the whole filling the void concept, I really only took seriously recently, but before then I've filled it with sort of nonsense to be honest, and then started another startup. What were some of the things you did differently?

35:44 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.

35:55 And change and maybe somewhere like 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.

36:08 Yeah, we can start with the bad one, which was how to monetize this site. 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 gonna monetize that? Logically, you think SAS, an upgraded version of what they're seeing for free. And for some reason I was like a paid newsletter.

36:33 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

36:47 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 this? People were 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 SAS, even though we said everywhere, like paid newsletter, paid newsletter, and they'd be like, I thought this was SAS, I thought this was SAS. That was our number one complaint. And uh yeah, sometimes you just need to like get that being 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 gonna 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

37:26 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 nine ninety-nine a month or whatever. And there's like the basic, intermediate, advanced version, enterprise, et cetera. That's us. Sorry to interrupt. I just want 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 shift it to what we should have been in the first place. So that was sort of the bad decision.

38:02 The good decision was definitely investing in Is data publishing data. Early on. So With Backlinko, this is something I only discovered after like five years of running the site.

38:14 And then with exploring topics, I was like, Day one, we're gonna publish tons of data, we're gonna be the source. That's another strategy, like be the source of information on Technology Software, e commerce, trends, anything trend related, we're gonna be the source. We're gonna have the latest data, we're gonna have

38:33 The best visuals, and we're just going to be the source for that information, as opposed to writing how to content. We really focus 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 well received publication of data. It took a while to get going, a lot of mistakes, a lot of

38:54 posts that weren't great or the topic Wasn't a good choice. What really helped us what was For the smash hit. Were these very specific stats that people look for?

39:05 So what I discovered through this process was This stats page idea is nothing new. Like people write, you know D Biggest Stats around the fitness industry.

39:14 Or LinkedIn stats or whatever, and those are fine. But Usually journalists aren't looking for LinkedIn stats. Or TikTok stats. Some of'em are, and that's fine, but most of them look at something very specific like

39:27 How many users did 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 you if you're able to find A credible stat. Around that

39:40 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 did Chat GPT 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

40:02 Specific stats page. Then you get into this 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 does ChatGPT have?

40:20 And every once in a while, Sam Alman 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 two hundred bucks. And then to update it every couple of months is like another fifty. And it's been referenced like three thousand times. It's absolutely insane.

40:41 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

40:54 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.

41:09 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.

41:34 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. 'Cause when you're first starting out, nothing's working.

41:56 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.

42:07 Now let's go 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, quadruple. It should really be like 10x down and what works. But 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.

42:26 Aside from the four hour work week, which was I suppose 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.

42:45 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. Like a master state.

42:59 What leads you to recommend this book? It gets people into the action mindset like uh Leaning towards action instead of analysis. I was guilty of this when I first started. Doing a lot of spreadsheets.

43:11 And analysis and business cards, registering a 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.

43:24 But the key is really like starting, starting, starting, or like Paul Graham says. Action produces information. So This is book well. hopefully give people a kick in the butt to get started instead of analyzing and then being like okay now I'm ready.

43:37 Just be like start today and then like 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.

43:49 Yeah. Like the break the whole point is to get started and like 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 the kick in the butt. That someone needs. This might be a tough question to answer, but how would you define the startup costs?

44:11 For Back Linko and Exploding topics, like in the first three months of those two companies. How much money was invested in each of those. Like how much money was required slash invested.

44:25 For Backlinko's case. A few hundred bucks at the most. It was like domain. WordPress I probably hired someone

44:34 to create like a basic blog design theme. For WordPress. Mm-hmm. Don't remember how much, but like If I spend a thousand, I would I see that's a lot. I was Buy more like five hundred bucks.

44:46 Mm-hmm. It's a blog. I mean, really, at the end of the day, there shouldn't be a lot of costs involved with that. Well, exploring time was a lot different because I acquired Like a prototype version from someone. For seventy five thousand. To start with.

45:00 That was part of their pay package as well. So just on day one, like I was in with that that much. And then it was a redesign and a rebrand. Adding more trends, add hiring a couple of people to do some basic things. So that was probably more like Ninety thousand, something in that range.

45:15 Mm-hmm. Um but it was a unique situation because I yeah, had uh 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 of months, but

45:31 It was in that range. Why did you acquire something and what was the the deal structure? Of the 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 a an opportunity for this like trend. Like I couldn't even describe it very well. It was just

45:51 You wanna 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. They used Reddit. So we'd look at subreddits and we would see how many times a word was mentioned or something, we've found nothing valuable.

46:10 The signal to noise ratio was completely backwards. It was like for every two hundred Hits one was like decent. And then one day someone forwarded me this random site this guy started. And I'm like, No, this

46:23 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 a hundred percent straight up. Part of the acquisition cost will be you'll get paid that. And then

46:37 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 if throughout that entire period of time to determine Help you determine if it's going well or not.

46:52 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.

47:04 If it goes well with full time for I think another month or so will be co-founders on this thing. The only rub will be if you line up a lot of equity. Then you're gonna have to put money in to fund this thing, or if you prefer that you get more cash than you can just get a proper salary.

47:21 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?

47:31 Love to be honest. Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah, I mean I My wife We met in Thailand, like Many years ago.

47:40 And then we moved to Berlin. This is actually a funny story, partially from the four work week, 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 three hundred euros a month.

47:55 And I'm like, Tim was right. This is amazing. Like you can live like a king in Berlin for nothing. So as we're like flying there, we send out all these emails like we're and of course all scams. It's like I'm lost and I like I oh I'm out of town, but if And I lost my passport, but if you leave like this money into Western Union, we show up to Berlin.

48:17 We're in a hostel. For like eight euros a night. And at a twelve bed hostel. While we realize that this whole thing All these ads we're applying to is a scam. No one uses Craigslist in Germany.

48:28 Ha ha. Uh huh. So then we eventually found an apartment, lived in Germany and She's uh Portuguese. So we visited Portugal a number of times while we lived there and eventually it was like

48:40 We could freeze our asses off, or we could live in the sun. So that's like Yeah, that's how we ended up here. The thing about the four worker, right? The principles and frameworks all still work. Obviously some of the tech tools, since they were last updated in two thousand nine, most of them are completely irrelevant. Probably not gonna use go to my PC at this point, right? To access your home computer remotely to do the work you need to do. But the

49:05 Pricing examples. obviously have changed, right? Since it was first written in two thousand seven, two thousand nine. So the principle The idea of geo arbitrage and applying that to what you earn. And how you pay.

49:20 Contractors, employees, and then your sort of living expenses. It applies, but Definitely for anybody who's 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

49:41 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.

49:58 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?

50:17 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 starting exploring topics and and how I was able to fill the void. Yeah.

50:32 Please. So set the stage for you like I sold back Linko and then about two years later sold exploding topics. And we're just kind of going. Full time.

50:43 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.

50:58 Maybe a bit of depression. For me the symptom was stress. Like 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 like 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.

51:21 So I struggle for like two months with stress on my aura ring. My stress was like Two X baseline. From

51:29 After I sold, and you'd think it'd be the opposite. 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. Gut away from the environment, got away from the day to day life.

51:48 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

51:59 Back to baseline. Or below baseline. What was the trip? It was a trip to the south of Portugal. To the Algarve.

52:06 Yeah. Nice oranges. Yeah. Yeah, good orange. Good orange. Yeah. Yeah, so spent some time down there and that was just like the hard reset. I think it's just to get you get out of your environment.

52:20 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 startup. And I read this Someone sent me this who another friend who had a a big acquisition.

52:36 He sent me this thing by I think it was Harvard Business Review and it was So they 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

52:53 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 warn that the A lot of case studies in this

53:08 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 gonna start a stuff and then I would be like a weightier, weightier, weightier. And then by the time a year came around

53:25 I didn't really want to because I was able to fill the void largely with tennis. For me, tennis is Then It just One activity fills.

53:34 Омост одіз Checks all the boxes and fills this void. It's amazing then because If you think about it. Like if you want to have fun. You

53:45 Play video games or watch TV or something. If you want to have s socialize, you go out drinking. If you want exercise, you go to the gym. If you wanna Get fresh air, you go for a walk. Tennis has all of these things, like in one activity.

53:58 And if you want a community, you need to like Actually don't even know how to do that outside of tennis. That was a thing that changed was what I joined a tennis club. And there's a lot of other entrepreneurs there. Lot of Americans, man. It's like the fifty first state over there, to be honest. But anyway, so

54:16 I've filled a 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. Mm-hmm. I love that. And

54:32 Just a few observations since As you would imagine, since the book came out in two thousand seven, I've had the opportunity to sort of vicariously watch a lot of people grapple with this. And having worked with so many startups. An angel investing. granted in a kind of venture backed environment, but a lot of the challenges are the same.

54:52 Whether it's You're coming out of For instance, you know, 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

55:06 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 uh very precarious Paradox of choice.

55:24 And Something like tennis. And some people listening might think like what? Tennis?

55:31 Probably 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

55:51 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.

56:06 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

56:20 when you have a real phase shift, which In the context of the four hour work week isn't necessarily selling a company. It's just like once you get it. Two. A high degree of automation where you're It requires two, three hours a week.

56:34 If that. to manage, which is more common than people might think. What you do with the rest of the time is a tremendously big question. So I love that. Makes me want to go back to the Algarve also. Can get a little toasty.

56:48 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 HPS 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. I know. Whoever it was. Brian, this has been super fun. Where would you like people to find you online?

57:12 If anywhere. Let's start with YouTube. Mm-hmm. So that would be the first place and then LinkedIn. Yeah.

57:19 Brian Dean on YouTube. And at Brian E Dean on LinkedIn. The other person must have grabbed that one. Yeah.

57:28 Oh. Brian, is there anything else you would like to say? Before we Wine to a close?

57:36 This has been great. Yeah. That's it. I know it's late. Several time zones away and I appreciate being flexible in the timing. So thanks so much for Taking the time

57:46 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 is necessary. To others and Also

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