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, nothing's working. And then when something does, most people are like, "Okay, that works. 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 down. It should really be like 10x down on what works because 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.
Brian, nice to meet you finally. Thank you for taking the time. Brian, where should we begin? I'm thinking maybe because the impetus for this is somewhat around the connective tissue of The 4-Hour Workweek. Should we just begin with how on earth you and The 4-Hour Workweek intersected? Maybe we start there.
So, it intersected at a really weird and sort of low time in my life where I had just started a PhD program at Purdue and I basically hated it. It was just overall not a 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 adviser 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 new then.
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, 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. So basically 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 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 starting a business was like in The Office when Michael Scott gives this lecture and 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 basically saw The 4-Hour Workweek, grabbed it, and it just sort of spoke to me.
What happened after that?
It blew my mind. I read the book. I'm like, "What? I could start a business?" It's like it was just a crazy mind-blowing concept that me, someone who has no experience, was totally broke, could start something. Not necessarily be a smash hit, but you could start something. So, basically, I just followed the book exactly as it was written. I mean, I was like, 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.
I was like, I'm not going to go to the next page until I'm good and ready. So, basically, I followed the plan and then created an ebook about nutrition. How to help your back pain with nutrition.
We have so much to cover. I know I'm cheating a little bit, but I think it's fair to say that your first attempt did not turn into the mega hit that you might have hoped.
No. Turns out it's hard to get traffic, right? 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 just I want to add a sidebar here, which is this is so common. It is incredibly common, right? That you basically have your sort of first love relationship seldom works out, right? 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, there's paid ads, which wasn't really something that I could do considering I was broke in my dad's basement having Dinty Moore 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 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 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 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 2001. Not a great time for most .com companies. So, I was working off of my soon-to-expire COBRA healthcare in California and eating also microwave dinners, or I remember there 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, right? But slowly figuring out the mechanics behind these things that we use every day, right? 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 like 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 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. So I would have likeshampoo.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. For those who can't see the video, we are both completely bald. Yeah. And yeah, then putting AdSense ads on the pages times 200. And the idea is that you scale up enough and you know, next thing a few steps later, you got a private island or something.
Right. Rough island, right? ABC dot dot dot and then private island.
So, let's back up a 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 if we're looking back to your reading of the book, right, 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, etc. And you come up with this very precise, not necessarily accurate, but it's a starting point number, right? 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? Were you thinking about that stuff at the time or was it just get out of the basement, need something besides 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. But 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.
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?
I was maybe at 3K a month around there for like a couple months. Yeah. Had a good ride and then it kind of got slapped. Didn't last long.
The first was a Panda update as you mentioned which was a very content focused update 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 you know thousands of websites get completely obliterated including mine.
That's a rough one. 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.
Mhm. Let's then go to you get scared straight as you put it and you build your first, as I think you've put it, real site, right, which isn't likeshampoo.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?
So, 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 basically like spam, spam, spam. And there were a couple voices in there of people who were like, "Guys, you know, build a real business. What are you guys doing? Like build something real that's durable that's not 100% reliant on Google." And I 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 basically 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.
So what is the bridge or what happens between that and then building Backlinko? Like how do you end up segueing? I mean I guess this could be like a very fast montage in the sort of fictionalized movie of your life, right? But what happened right 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 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. 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 basically vague advice. Create great content. Build relationships with other people. You know, market your site, lead with integrity. You're like, "Okay, what's my next step?" Very unclear. It was as vague as you can imagine.
So then Backlinko is a case of sort of creating the thing that you couldn't find.
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, and 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 smart, but it'll probably become very obvious once you explain why you did it. Like why were you digging through Google patents and then engineer statements? Are those part of the patents or are those something separate?
Okay. Could you explain what you were doing?
When I launched Backlinko, I was like, there must be other people like me who are getting into this whole world of SEO. 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 basically 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 have an idea. I came up with an 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 going to grab you by the shirt and be like, I need to read this. It was just slightly above average than 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 list of 10 or 20 that I'd seen out there. And then I got to like 55 and I'm like, man, 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. 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 they'll be like, "Oh, I've 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 for videos and transcripts of presentations. Right? This was incredibly valuable when I was getting started as well, mostly looking at kind of closed door or very small event presentations and things like that. Mhm. All right. So, that was sort of a massive post that you really invested in. 25 hours. It's not trivial, right? I mean, 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 leprechaun is going to show up and trade for a pot of gold, right? So, what was the response to that post?
Massive traffic and controversy. Kind of everything you want in a piece of content to be honest.
I mean, you had the traffic, you had 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 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. You know, it's not anything super controversial, but just enough to get people's attention. So yeah, it brought in I mean I would say I was probably getting like 150 visitors a month. That probably brought in a couple thousand when I first put it out. It's brought in millions 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.
Like I was using this 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 scrapped 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 that'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 you got 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 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 essentially a marketing platform that help you get better results from SEO, pay-per-click, and also now AI search.
And are they private, publicly traded? They're publicly traded, right? Yeah, it looks like on the New York Stock Exchange.
They got acquired 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, right?
I mean, there's so many good aspects to this, but do you want to tell the story about flying to Boston? And 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 we might be interested in buying your company like let me be direct and you're like okay I'll reply to that one. 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 a pretty good line. 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. Like, let's go go go to Boston. It was really a meet and greet where the executive team just wanted to meet me and chat about, you know, see how I could help them, how Backlinko could fit into their platform and their business. And 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 myself, right? I'm like, what? We're celebrating the deal now? Like I didn't even see a 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, Brian. 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. They're going to Did I miss something? Did I black out? What happened? Exactly. I'm like, did I agree? Like, is a verbal agreement enough for a deal like this? So, yeah, I was way off on that. It took two more months of due diligence after that meeting for the deal to actually close.
Which for people who have never gone through it, right? That can be very challenging if you don't have your ducks in a row, right? Which almost nobody does unless they've kind of been through this before or are venture-backed and they have people overseeing all this stuff. Two months is pretty good, right? Like it's painful but like man like 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 Backlinko thinking that you were going to sell it right 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 Warrillow 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 like 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 had experience with that.
