Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show.
This is a shorter episode and by request. Many of you have requested more 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies—conversations with people who have read the book, applied it, and built lives and businesses I never could have imagined. Brian Dean—today’s guest—has a story that starts exactly where a lot of great stories start: broke, directionless, and eating canned beef stew in his dad’s basement during the 2008 financial crisis.
He picked up a copy of The 4-Hour Workweek and took action. As is nearly always the case, his path wasn’t a straight line, but a series of winding turns, all fed by experiments. Today’s episode covers geoarbitrage, testing assumptions cheaply, building a muse, automating income, and—the chapter almost everyone skips—filling the void. His journey includes failures, two successful exits, and a hard-won answer to the question most people never think to ask: what do you actually do with your freedom once you have it?
But who is Brian?
Brian Dean is the founder of Backlinko and Exploding Topics, both acquired by Semrush, which itself was recently acquired by Adobe for $1.9 billion.
P.S. A special thank you to Elaine Pofeldt 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.
Please enjoy!
This episode is brought to you by:
4-Hour Workweek Success Story, Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies
Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.
“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 … It 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 who has no experience, was totally broke, could start something, not necessarily be a smash hit, but you could start something.”
— Brian Dean
“I feel like [Ready, Fire, Aim] 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.”
— Brian Dean
“When you sell [your company], there are 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. It all goes away. You have it and then one day you literally don’t.”
— Brian Dean
“Tennis … fills almost all of these boxes or checks all of the boxes and fills this void. It’s amazing because, if you think about it, if you want to have fun, you play video games or watch TV or something. If you want to socialize, you go out drinking. If you want to exercise, you go to the gym. If you want to get fresh air, you go for a walk. Tennis does all of these things in one activity.”
— Brian Dean
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Want to hear an episode with the person who gave Brian his best piece of business advice? Listen to my conversation with serial entrepreneur and AppSumo founder Noah Kagan, in which we discussed launching a million-dollar business in a weekend, the 48-hour money challenge, finding your first customers before you build anything, the LOT (listen, options, transition) sales framework, the “coffee challenge” as a training wheel for asking, geoarbitrage from Austin to Barcelona, why most business ideas die of “idea constipation,” and much more.
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