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Brian Dean

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2026-04-16
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2026-04-16
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  1. “Could Good oranges, yeah. So spend some time down there, and that was just like the hard reset. I think it's just going to get out of your environment. But then when I got back, it was like stress is gone, but now feeling a little bit bored. Like that boredom was coming back. And I was tempted to start another startup. And I read this. Someone sent me this, another friend who had a big acquisition. He sent me this thing by, I think it was Harvard Business Review, and it was they interviewed founders that had just exited and they asked him their advice. What was it like? What were the good ups and the downs? And they basically said, when you sell, there are like psychological dangers that can occur. One is that you lose your sense of structure. The other is you lose your sense of purpose and you lose your sense of connection with your team.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

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

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “So set the stage for you. Like, I sold back Linko, and then about two years later sold exploding topics and was just kind of going full time, not super crazy working all the time because I was fairly efficient, but still working all the time and then went from that to like stop to zero. And a lot of people, I think they have this feeling of like listlessness, no direction, maybe a bit of depression. For me, the symptom was stress. 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. So I struggle for like two months with stress on my aura ring. My stress was like 2x baseline.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “One thing was honestly that I have discovered recently that I wanted to share would be actually filling the void. I felt the void after slowly exploring topics and how I was able to fill the void.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “We show up to Berlin. We're in a hostel for like eight euros a night in a 12 bed hostel while we realize that this whole thing all these ads we're applying to is a scam. No one uses Craigslist in Germany. So then we eventually found apartment, lived in Germany, and she's a Portuguese. So we visited Portugal a number of times when we lived there and eventually was like, we could freeze our asses off or we could live in the sun.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Yeah, I mean, my wife, we met in Thailand like many years ago, and then we moved to Berlin. This is actually a funny story, partially from the four-hour 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 300 euros a month. And we're like, Tim was right. This is amazing. Like you can live like a Kim Berlin for nothing. So as we're like flying there, we send out all these emails. And of course, all scams. It's like, I'm lost. And I, oh, I'm out of town. But if I lost my passport, but if you leave this money into this Western Union.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Exactly. And he was the coder and developer behind the original version. So he was best qualified to continue to work on it and improve it rather than hiring someone random to come in. It was his vision to start with. Then I said, if it goes well with full-time for, I think another month or so, we'll be co-founders on this thing. The only rub will be if you line up a lot of equity, then you're going to have to put money in to fund this thing. Or if you prefer that you get more cash, then you can just get a proper salary and then I'll own most of the business. So that's what we did. He chose more money. And then he owned part of as equity.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Part of the acquisition cost will be you'll get paid that. And then on top of that, if it goes well over the first, I think couple months, then we can set up some sort of part-time deal. And if that goes well, we can do full-time.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Acquired it because I was trying to build this exact thing myself and just stumbling and stubbing my toe over and over again. So I knew that there was an opportunity for this like trend. Like I couldn't even describe it very well. It was just, you want to go to a website, it 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. It used Reddit so we look at subreddits and we would see how many times a word was mentioned or something, but found nothing valuable. The signal to noise ratio was completely backwards. It was like for every 200 hits, one was like decent. And then one day someone forwarded me this random site, this guy started. And I'm like, no, this, this is exactly what I want. But it was even better than I had imagined. So then it reached out to him. And then the deal structure was buy it 100% straight up.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “But it was a unique situation because I 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.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “For Backlinko's case, a few hundred bucks at the most. It was like domain, WordPress, Probably hired someone to create a basic blog design theme for WordPress. Remember how much, but like if I spend a thousand, I would say that's a lot. I was probably more like 500 bucks. It's a blog. I mean, really, at the end of the day, there shouldn't be a lot of costs involved with that. With Exploring Time is a lot different because I acquired like a prototype version from someone for 75,000 to start with. That was part of their pay package as well. So just on day one, like I was in with that much. And then it was a redesign and a rebrand, adding more trends, hiring a couple people to do some basic things. So that was probably more like 90,000, something in that range.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “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 kick in the butt that someone needs”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “It gets people into the action mindset like leaning towards action instead of analysis. I was guilty of this when I first started doing a lot of spreadsheets and analysis and business cards, registering 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. But the key is really like starting, starting, starting, or like Paul Graham says, action produces information. this book will hopefully give people a kick in the butt to get started instead of analyzing and then being like, okay, now I'm ready. Just be like, start today and then 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.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “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. Familiar with that one”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “It sounds so simple, but it's one of those pieces of advice that's simple but hard to follow because when you're running a business, there's like a million things to worry about, to focus on. There's new opportunities, new challenges, other competitors. You have an employee that's sick. It's hard to really focus on like that little thing that works. I think this is especially important when you're first starting out. Because when you're first starting out, nothing's working, almost by definition. Like you're starting something new, at least in my experience, when I'm starting something new, I don't know. like nothing's working and then when something does most people are like okay that works now let's do something else but instead you should just take that niche it's almost like a little niche when you're rock climbing just take that niche and just double down triple down quadru it should really be like 10x down in 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”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “They'll have the effort to reward ratio is nuts on that. And of course, it's just like. Part of it is some pieces do better than others, but we've noticed that that formula tends to work well. If you can find a trending specific stat that bloggers or journalists are looking for when they write about that topic, they're very likely to reference you.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “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 does ChatGPT have? Granted, we published this early. That's another thing that can help a lot. If you publish one of the first or the first specific stats page, then you get into 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 ChatGPD have? And every once in a while, Sam Maltman will give a talk and he'll mention it or when they raise around, 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 cost hiring a freelancer like 200 bucks. And then to update it every couple months, it was like another 50. And it's been referenced like 3,000 times. It's absolutely insane.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Took a while to get going. A lot of mistakes, a lot of posts that weren't great, or the topic wasn't a good choice. What really helped us, what was sort of the smash hit, were these very specific stats that people look for. So what I discovered through this process was this stats page idea is nothing new. Like people write, you know, the biggest stats around the fitness industry or LinkedIn stats or whatever. And those are fine, but usually journalists aren't looking for LinkedIn stats or TikTok stats. Some of them are, and that's fine, but most of them look at something very specific, like how many users do TikTok have or how many people use LinkedIn every day, like daily active users, or how many posts are on LinkedIn every day. Like it's super specific. So if you're able to find a credible stat around that, then you can crush it. Even if you're not the one that developed it, like a lot of times these are also buried in like PDFs or”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “If you had told me that before we started, I would have been like, oh, logically, then we should have the premium advanced enterprise version in the back end instead of the paid newsletter idea. So that didn't really go well until we ultimately shifted to what we Backlinko, this is something I only discovered after like five years of running the site. And then with exploring topics, I was like, day one, we're going to publish tons of data. We're going to be the source. That's another strategy, like be the source of information on technology, software, e-commerce trends, anything trend related, we're going to be the source. We're going to have the latest data. We're going to have the best visuals. And we're just going to be the source for that information as opposed to writing how-to content, we really focus on data-driven content.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Newsletter page news, and they'd be like, I thought this was SAS, I thought this was SAS. That was our number one complaint. And yeah, sometimes you just need to get that bean overhead because I was like, oh, SAS is so complicated. My co founder was a coder, but I'm still like, oh, we're going to have to hire developers and I don't know anything about this whole world.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Yeah, we can start with the bad one, which was how to monetize this site. I had this very strange idea that we're going to create this awesome free resource that anyone can visit and just see trends right away. They can filter, they can go by category. And you think, oh, how are you going to monetize that? Logically, you think SaaS, an upgraded version of what they're seeing for free. And for some reason, I was like a paid newsletter. Like, let's create a paid newsletter. So we created this paid newsletter that was granted helpful in like objective terms, but not necessarily for that person who wants to see trends in their particular niche. So we would send them a trend on like some sort of face cream and then on like a car and then a battery and then a tech startup. And they would be like, what is this? People were like, I want just trends about e-commerce. I just want trends about this one thing. Like, why are you sending me all this stuff? And then people would also sign up thinking it's SAS, even though we said everywhere, like page.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “It was like, I need to work. I need to build something. I'm not building this. I'm just maintaining it. So that's really what got me into exploring topics. So honestly, the filling the void chapter, the whole feeling 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.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “I was bored, honestly. I wasn't feeling it well. I wasn't filling the void. Going to the gym, reading books, playing video games. I think that was part of this and we, this boredom, was I needed to reread that chapter essentially and fill this with something meaningful. And I think that's why I was seeking another startup project because I'm like.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Give me something to do between these sessions with Backlinko, which was it was also boring because it was so optimized. I work like three hours a week. It was like four hour work week, honestly, at the end. Was getting so much traffic on autopilot. The launches were really easy to do. Even courses were easier to create at the end because it just had it all down to a science. Even if it was a totally different topic, I knew exactly how to create a course. So the challenge wasn't really there. And this was like, okay, new challenge, new space. It wasn't so much financial. It was more just to freshen things up and to try something new.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “It wasn't really 100% financial. Like when I sold backlinko, before then I was probably okay from most of my life. Then when I sold backlinko, it was like, okay, I'm probably good for forever. And then I wouldn't have probably started something else right away if I hadn't already. Towards the end of BacLinko's, when I was involved with it before I sold, I was honestly getting a little bit bored with it. I was bored talking about the same things, writing about the same things, doing the whole course launch thing. And I kind of wanted something new. 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 purely financial. It was more like, this is kind of exciting and new. I think it's a good opportunity as well.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “I kind of wish I first did differently. Yeah. And looking back, I wish I took some time off. It was just tricky because, you know how it is. When you have a startup, it's kind of a strange situation. Like I had a new company that was growing. I had this old company that I sold and it felt weird to say to the new team, like, hey guys, I need to reflect about how great my life is. I need to chill out. You guys still work, though. Like you walk your asses off. I'm going to stone the beach for a while. So it felt a little weird. I felt like I kind of had to go back into the trenches with them right away, almost even more so to prove like, look, I'm not done. Like, I'm not going to rest on my laurels. We're still in it to win it.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “It's honestly not 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 because it was late here. So like the next day was really when I was sending messages to people and stuff and getting congratulations and whatnot. But after that day, I was pretty much back working on the next thing. Didn't reflect too much on it. So my life was more or less the same one day after.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Given the time z Time zone differences, and I like I'm early to bed kind of person. So they told me that, hey, Brian, we're going to announce this tomorrow and we're going to announce it at 5 p.m. Eastern. And I'm like, oh man, I don't know. Is it possible to send it earlier? That's like 10 p.m. here. I'm already kind of getting ready for bed. Basically say I'm in my PJs at that point. Is it possible to push this earlier? And they said, no, because it's a public company due to SEC rules, we have to make these announcements after the market's close. I was so embarrassed. I was like, oh yeah, right. I forgot the league I'm playing in here.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “You don't own any of this work once you're paid, it's a property of blah, blah, blah. That made things a lot easier the second time, but I had no idea this independent contractor thing was so important to the acquire, but it absolutely is”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “If you don't have your finances in order, like you don't get PLs, 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 independent contractors. I mean, I'm like you. I hired so many people that created like a blog post image or something or like a social media image once for like 10 bucks and I had to go try to find them. I have to hire almost like a private investigator to find these people because you don't even barely remember them. Even people that ghosted me. I had people that I paid like a deposit for a work and they never even replied. They totally ghosted me. And I still had to reach out to those people. Of course I'm not going to reply, but you have to show that you tried. And then obviously since this experience, every contractor that gets hired signs an ironclad agreement that says”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Exactly. I'm like, did I agree? Like, is a verbal agreement enough for a deal like this? So, yeah, that was definitely. I was way off on that. It took two more months of due diligence after that meeting, the deal to actually close.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “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 deny this something.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “In my mind, I'm like, we're going to close this thing. Let's 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 BankLinko could fit into their platform and their business. So I spent 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. 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 potential center.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “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 X. And that was sort of how I totally changed my content focus.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “I just threw out the whole playbook I was doing. 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 my own questions, just to have something to put out there. And I'm reading, I'm like, why would anyone want to read this? So then I just scrapped the whole thing.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Massive traffic and controversy, kind of everything you want in a piece of concept, to be honest. I mean, you had the traffic, you had people, the wow factor, and then you had the controversy, which is like, those aren't Google's 200 ranking factors. 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. It's not anything super controversial, but just enough to get people's attention. So yeah, brought in, I mean, I would say I was probably getting like 150 visitors a month. That probably brought in a couple thousand when I first put it out. It's brought a million since then.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “So I had this idea for a post, which was Google recently had said that there's 200 ranking factors in the algorithm. So I was like, let's just try to find them. Obviously, a lot of it's going to be conjecture and guessing and speculation, but let's just do a list of 200 instead of the lists of 10 or 20 that I had seen out there. And then I got to like 55. And I'm like, man, there's really, you have to really dig to find some of these. And that's when I went through the Google patents. And also people would interview Google engineers or they would give statements about they'd be at a conference and they would give a talk and 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.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “So, yeah, I did that and banged my head against the wall. And I was like, you know what? 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 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.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “When I launch back Linko, I was like, there must be other people like me who are getting into this whole world of Wahasio. They want to learn more about it and they're disappointed about what's out there. And it turns out there was, 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.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “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 vague advice, great, great content, build relationships with other people.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “It was that first update and then a second update where I was in Spain and Grenada. And I went to my hospital, I checked a laptop, and it was like, again, it was like a repeat of the Thailand experience. Everything dropped. This was a different set of websites that got knocked out. And I was like, you know what, this is crazy. Why am I doing this? This is an insane way to live. So then I was like, I'm going to build this one real website. And I was kind of inspired because there were these forums at the time with these marketing people. And they're like, spam, spam, spam. And there was always, there were a couple 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 100% reliant on Google. And I was kind of ignored those people. And then once I got hit that second time, I was like, okay, it's time to build something real. So I built a sort of real site in the personal finance space, wrote real blog content, didn't do any shady spammy stuff and tried to keep it on the up and up.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “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 SEO and I'll get away with it. It didn't work. So that one I think I was in Thailand when it happened.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Google. It was an update that basically was if your content is thin or repetitive or not helpful, we're going to wipe you out. And it was like a one day they push a button and thousands of websites completely obliterated, including mine.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “Yeah, I was maybe at 3k a month around there for like a couple months. 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 is a very content-focused update.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “Yeah, it was a proper that's not out of a can. I just wrote that in the whole dreamlining section, that was basically what I wrote. Morphed a little bit. At first, it was that, and then building the 200 websites at some point, I was in Asia backpacking. And then my whole world changed to 3K a month. I was like, if you can get 3K a month in Thailand, you can live like a king. So my whole goal just became to get 3K a month passive income. That was like my entire focus. So it sort of shifted once I had sort of a lifestyle that I tried and liked. I was like, I could live like a backpacker. I can do this. So then it just became 3K a month for a long time, for like a year.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “And yeah, putting AdSense ads on the pages times 200 and the idea is that you scale up enough and take a few steps later, you got a private island or something. You're right.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “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. 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 obviously don't really know a lot about.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Spent all this time on creating a product that I thought was helpful. I thought was good. And then it was like, now what? How do you get people to actually see this thing? And like you said, Tim, there's paid ads, which wasn't really something that I could do considering I was broke in my dad's basement, having DT 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 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 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.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “I was like, I'm not going to go to the next page until I'm ready, good and ready. I followed the plan and then created an ebook about nutrition, how to help your back pain with nutrition.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “Blew my mind. I read the book. I'm like, well, I could start a business. It was just a crazy mind-blowing concept that someone has no experience was totally broke, could start something, not necessarily be a smash hit, but you could start something. I just followed the book exactly as it was written. I literally had notes in the margins. You had those little Q&As at the end, little steps at the end. I would make sure I wouldn't go past that page until I did everything.”

    2026-04-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT