Brian Dean: From $0 to $7.3m SaaS Business in 3 Years

Hello and welcome to the mid-week newsletter. Am calling it Product In Reverse - where am reversing product marketing insights that got SaaS companies into $$m ARR.

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Creator + SaaS:  How Brian Dean built Exploding Topics to $83k+/MRR in 3 years.

Company: Exploding Topics - discover exploding topics before they take off

The Backstory

I consider Brian Dean an SEO and marketing expert. I stumbled upon his YouTube channel about four years ago while upskilling in SEO. Then, I realized Brian owned Backlinko ( acquired by Semrush for $4 million in 2022) - an SEO learning website.

Around the same time, when I discovered Brian Dean, he had acquired Exploding Topics ( initially called Trennd.co) from his co-founder Josh.

Here is how the acquisition went down.

Josh had been building Exploding Topics for 6 months when Brian reached out. Then Brain offered to pay Josh a 12-month salary and a future revenue split with Josh.

After the deal was struck, Josh and Brian decided to promote their new venture - Exploding Topics.

Josh - shared (Medium, Hakcernews, entrepreneur subreddit) story on how his startup got acquired in 6 months - got featured on Medium Creator, while Brain sent out an email to his Backlinko subscribers.

The outcome - 25k spike in traffic. 

However, this was not sustainable, using the feedback from the initial users - who heavily requested a newsletter. Josh and Brian would later launch a paid newsletter as the first product before pivoting into SaaS.

The Launches

The Success on Product Hunt

The first actual launch happened on Product Hunt. It happened 4 years ago, and exploding topics topped the charts on the Product Hunt that month.

The Free Tool Launch

Commonly dubbed Product-led growth, Brian decided to offer a free tool on their homepage. This drove thousands of traffic and still does.

The basic premise is to take a commonly used feature of your Saas product and offer it for free. Let the users give your solution a try before even considering premium.

If you follow me on LinkedIn, a couple of days ago, I wrote about offering Free tools, not freemium if you want to hack your product growth. Again, this experiment has been done by marketing experts like Neil Patel and tech giants like HubSpot.

As a SaaS founder, you don’t have to create the tool from scratch, you take the Neil and Brian path - acquire it while it’s in the early stage. I remember Neil Patel mentioning he acquired UberSuggest for $120k, and now it multi-million dollar SaaS company.

The Tuesday’s Newsletter

In the early stages of Exploding Topics, Brian launched a weekly newsletter called Exploding Topics Tuesday. 3 years later the newsletter now has over 96,000 subscribers with a 51.3 open rate,

I will cover more about building the newsletter, but here are details on the recent new product launch they did.

The outcome - Add $10k MRR to the company and grow the revenue by 8.6%.

Recently Brian's team launched a new payment tier. Initially, it was two but now three. Here is the newsletter process that they used;

The Pre-launch

The messaging of the product you want to release. You need to build anticipation. Brian mentioned the new plan in their weekly newsletter.

It was simple and to the point. It said:

The Launch

In the case of the new payment tier, Brian added a story to showcase the work that went into deciding on the Business Plan launch.

Brian mentioned having done beta testing. Make the launch sound like a big deal. On D-day, they added scarcity to the launch - like offering a Free upgrade to the existing customers to jump on board.

Also, instead of offering discounts consider adding a form of scarcity to the launch.

The Deadline

Here is giving the first reminder, and offering the scarcity element. Brian’s team made it interesting by going into details by offering the added features.

The last message -the second reminder, is to daily up the scarcity event. Brian included a message like: ‘ This is the last message we will send on the launch before getting to our normal weekly newsletter ‘

The Power of the Newsletter

Before pivoting into software, Brian had launched Exploding Toipics as a paid newsletter. However, the team kept growing the newsletter by sending 4 trends every Tuesday.

The outcome - 96.247 subscribers as of this video on Brian Dean's channel, 

Note; This is not the first time Brian has built a successful newsletter. Before Backlinko was acquired, it had over 200k subs.

Here is how Brian built Exploding Topics Tuesday to almost 100k subs.

New signups CD welcome message

The CD stands for Confirmation and Deliverability.

Simply, you want to confirm they made the right decision to sign up.

When someone signs up for the newsletter, send them a welcome message to remind them to move you to the ‘Primary Tab.

I just re-signed up today, and here is the email template from Exploding Topics.

You will notice the following from the welcome email that impacts your message deliverability.

• Asking Gmail users to move you to Primary

• Asking them to reply to the email - check PS;

• Sharing the previous newsletter to get a clue of what to expect.

Creating a Branded Newsletter

Like the Exploding Topics Tuesday, you want your newsletter to be branded -separate from your company. It creates memorability.

Also, have a template to build familiarity and save you the time of having to create a unique one every week.

Offer bit-size value like the 4 trends offered by Exploding Topics. And most importantly, never miss out on the weekly consistency to build up user habits on reading your newsletter.

Create a Dedicated Page for the Newsletter

As Brian says, if you are serious about building your email list, create a dedicated page on the website - preferably on the navigation page.

The SEO Scaleup

In Brian Dean’s own words, he is surprised at how fast they went from 0 to 417k monthly visitors. Am not surprised, considering his SEO experience and the template strategy the team continues to execute.

Here is the breakdown of how Brain built Exploding Topics’ SEO to 400k+ traffic and the moves they are making to hit 1 million/mo visitors.

The outcomes - 6,000 new signups, and 532 new free trials every month.

The List Posts Templates

Brian attributes the growth in traffic to 4 templates that the team uses to create content. These are top and middle-of-the-funnel content with high traffic volumes.

An example template is - The Startup List Post

• Fintech Startups

• SaaS Startups

Another one is Trends List Posts ;

This has made scaling content easier instead of re-inventing the wheel every time your team is working on the content piece.

The Reverse Outreach Method

The method works in this simple way - instead of publishing content and hoping to get backlinks, you reverse engineer the content to attract link creators.

You are linkable assets for creators (bloggers) and journalists. These are mainly statistics and database aggregation.

Using this method, Exploding Topics gets over 1,347 backlinks every month. Here is how the strategy works:

1. Find journalist keywords - when looking for data and stats to link to
In the case of Exploding topics, they write on technology.

Example; How many SaaS Startups are there? - Bloggers writing on SaaS startups are probably looking for stats on this topic.

2. Outline how you want it to look. Frontload with the value. Keep it short and straight to the point.

3. Take advantage of internal linking with related content pages you have written on your topic.

You wanna be the source. Consider linking to the source if you are doing an aggregation of stats.

Another example: How many people own Bitcoin?

The Road to 1millon/mo Visitors

Before I dive into what Brian shared on scaling to 1M/mo visitors, scaling content can be hard. From 0 to 100k Brian Dean wrote most of the Exploding Topics blog content.

But scaling to 400k+, Brain hired a team of writers from Upwork and shared his hiring process in this video. The content scale moved from 1/week to 4-5 SEO posts per week.

Summary: hire several writers to do a similar project, and whoever does the best, add them to the team.

The path to 1M/monthly visitors is decorated with these strategies;

• Creating more unique templates - unique ones and out of the Exploding Topics space. example; Top TikTok Trends( Feburary 2024) 

• Optimizing existing content - Often underrated but updating old content can push the needle on traffic visits

• Focus on internal linking - Simple and powerful when done right to build authority.

BONUS: Reducing Churn from 10.1% to 2.7%

It may be easy to outpace your churn when you are doing under $10k/MRR but when scaling fast, it starts to be hard to beat it. Here are the steps Brian took to reduce Exploding Topics to under 3%

Insights from customers

The team trapped a list of the longest customers from their Stripe accounts and analyzed them. They took their top customers, studied them, and built features specifically meant for them.

Take an example avatar - VC and Investors looking for startups they want to invest in. The team at Exploding Topics created specific avatar features with filters to help them succeed when they log in.

Another example is E-commerce entrepreneurs - specifically Amazon sellers, so they created features for them to be able to filter trending products on Amazon, reviews, and more.

Improving Onboarding Sequence

From a messy trend database, they improved the onboarding flow by curating the top trends to give users the best first impression.

When users onboard, they choose the categories they want to see and get the personalized list.

Now, when they log in, they can turn on - to keep track of the category project. It immensely improved their experience.

Going Annual Only

It may sound simple, but monthly payment has a higher churn, compared to annual. And if they churn, you have got one year of revenue.

Brian recommends going annual, and in case you are running a promotion, give discounts for annual subscriptions only.

Lastly, the weekly newsletter report covers those users who are no longer using Exploding Topics to get value without necessarily logging into the database.

That is all I would gather with my free limited time.

Let me know your thoughts on the research. Send a reply or DM on LinkedIn 

Thank you for reading!

God speed!