Hi, I’m Brian.
The short version: I’m Brian Dean. I built and sold two companies (Backlinko and Exploding Topics, both acquired by Semrush), and now I write about SEO, AI search, and building online businesses.
The longer version:
The basement years
I had just dropped out of a PhD program, right into the financial crisis. I had a degree in nutrition, and the plan was to become a dietitian. But nobody was hiring. My daily routine was applying for jobs in the morning and watching Jerry Springer in the afternoon.
Then one day I picked up The 4-Hour Workweek at the bookstore down the street. Until that moment, it had genuinely never occurred to me that I could start a business. Nobody in my family was an entrepreneur. Starting a company was something other people did.
My first product (a program about fixing back pain with nutrition) got zero sales. Not low sales. Zero. I’d spent months perfecting it and no time thinking about how anyone would actually find it.
That failure taught me the lesson that shaped everything since: making something is maybe 20% of it. Getting it in front of people is the other 80%.
The spammy years
So I went deep on marketing. First the wrong way: at one point I ran 250 one-page websites with names like lorealshampoo.org, all built to game Google’s algorithm. It worked great until Google pushed a button and deleted my entire “empire” overnight. Twice. The second time, I was checking my laptop in a hostel in Granada when I realized everything was gone.
That scared me straight. Time to build something real.
Backlinko
In 2012 I started Backlinko, an SEO blog built on a simple idea: instead of publishing constantly, publish rarely, and make each thing 10x better than anything else on the topic. One early post took me 25 hours of digging through Google patents and engineer interviews. It’s brought in over a million visitors since.
For a while, I also lived the full 4-Hour Workweek arc: backpacking through Asia, living in Thailand, chasing $3k a month in passive income. (I eventually learned that maximum freedom and maximum happiness are not the same thing. But that’s its own story.)
Backlinko grew into one of the most-read marketing resources in the world, with a YouTube channel that reached 500,000+ subscribers and an email list six figures deep. Semrush acquired it in 2022. The acquisition email almost didn’t happen, by the way. Their first outreach said “let’s connect to collaborate,” and I deleted it because it looked exactly like spam. Luckily, they followed up.
Exploding Topics
In 2020 I co-founded Exploding Topics, a trend-spotting platform used by brands like Google, Adobe, Shopify and Netflix. This time I ran everything behind the scenes (no videos, no personal brand, just the product and the data). Our free tool and data-driven content got cited thousands of times, including by Forbes, Fortune, scientific journals, and at one point the UK government. Semrush acquired it in 2024.
After the second sale, I learned the hard way that the day after you “win” is a whole different challenge. My stress levels doubled for two months. What fixed it wasn’t another startup… it was tennis, a vacation, and figuring out what I actually wanted my days to look like.
Now
These days: I live in Lisbon, Portugal, with my wife. I play tennis four or five times a week (arguably too much). I make SEO videos for Semrush’s YouTube channel, I’m quietly building a site in the online education space, and I write about what I’ve learned… the stuff that worked, and plenty that didn’t.
No course at the end. I just like this stuff.
If you want to get in touch: brian@briandean.me.