--- title: 'How I Bought, Rebranded, and Launched Exploding Topics' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=SgzPwAROwlM' video_id: 'SgzPwAROwlM' date: 2026-07-14 duration_sec: 0 --- # How I Bought, Rebranded, and Launched Exploding Topics > Source: [How I Bought, Rebranded, and Launched Exploding Topics](https://youtube.com/watch?v=SgzPwAROwlM) ## Summary Brian Dean shares the behind-the-scenes story of acquiring and rebranding a trend discovery tool called Trend CEO into Exploding Topics. He details the acquisition terms, rebranding process, launch strategy, and future plans for the tool. ### Key Points - **Acquisition of Trend CEO** [00:00] — Brian bought Trend CEO from creator Josh for the equivalent of a year's salary as a full-time developer, with Josh receiving a cut of future revenue and a six-month contract. - **Rebranding to Exploding Topics** [01:30] — The original domain 'trend.co' was hard to spell and remember. Brian rebranded to 'explodingtopics.com' to better reflect the tool's purpose and target audience (content creators). - **Design Overhaul** [03:00] — Brian worked with designer Matt to refresh the site's design, resulting in a significant visual upgrade while keeping the strong UI. - **Launch Day Success** [04:00] — Launched on December 3rd with a coordinated effort: Josh shared his acquisition story on Reddit, Medium, and Hacker News; Brian promoted to Backlinko community. Achieved #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt and 25,000 visitors on day one. - **Post-Launch Traction** [06:00] — Unlike Trend CEO's previous spikes that faded to zero, Exploding Topics retained traffic after launch, indicating long-term potential. - **Prioritizing User Feedback** [07:00] — Brian and Josh focused on user feedback: fixed search feature clarity and launched a newsletter ('Exploding Topics Tuesday') based on high demand. - **Future Plans** [08:30] — Plans include adding more data sources to find more topics and improving the algorithm to reduce noise and increase signal quality. ### Conclusion The acquisition and rebranding of Trend CEO into Exploding Topics was a strategic move to serve content creators with emerging topic discovery. The launch was highly successful, and ongoing improvements focus on user feedback and technical enhancements. ## Transcript hey what's up everybody Brian Dean here as you may have seen I recently launched a new tool called exploding topics and in this video I'm gonna reveal the entire story what this thing actually is why I bought it and the future plans including lots of behind the scenes stuff stay tuned so a few months ago backlinko CTO lloyd sent me a link to something called trend CEO this is a tool that someone had built to bubble up trends across different industries and around that time I wanted to build something similar in fact we even had a very early prototype of something that attempted to do basically the same thing that trended but trend was lightyears ahead of what we had built or even what we had aimed to build so I emailed the creator of trend Josh to see if he might be open to selling the site and about a week later we hopped on skype as it turned out we both had the same vision for the tool and on that first call we mapped out the terms for a deal in those terms were this for the tool itself I paid Josh the equivalent of a year salary as a full-time developer Josh had spent about six months building the tool so this gave him a 2x return honest time he would also get a significant cut of any future revenue that the tool brought in that way Josh got some of the upside if things took off the final term is that her work with Josh as a contractor for six months so he could continue building up the tool and after sending the money his way this site was transferred to backlinko the question was what should be my next move well one of the first things I wanted to work on was the site's branding and design at the time the site's domain was TR e N and D Co which was super hard to spell or remember I'd have to say things like yeah it's trend but with two ends and no no it's not a dot-com it's a CEO so yeah the name wasn't bad but it was kind of hard to say or share with people in fact as the deal was going down I told a few close friends that I was buying the site and it was a huge pain to explain the name of the site that I was about to buy so priority number one was a new name and brand originally Josh and I wanted to play off the word trend the tools job was to surface trends so that made sense the thing was there already too popular newsletters out there glimpse and the hustle trends that were designed to surface trends and I didn't want to go head-to-head against these established brands plus our audience was different than the hustle or glimpse the target market for glimpse our VCS and people that invest in new companies and the hustle trends targets people that are new to our shop an Earthship our target audience content creators like bloggers and youtubers that want to find growing topics before they take off so instead of becoming the third surface that offered up growing trends we were the first to find emerging topics next we had to come up with a new name for the site a name that complemented our new branding and our target audience I personally prefer to always go with the dot-com even if that means the names gonna be a little bit on the longer side I can live with that if it's a dot-com and after baiting a couple different name ideas we eventually decided on exploding topics calm to me the name was perfect because it described exactly what the tool did plus the dot-com was available the next step was to get a new design for the website as you seen already from shots that I showed you of trend CEO the old site wasn't bad looking or anything and the UI was actually pretty strong that's because the user interface did its job which is to help people find new trends so we didn't need a wholesale change to the layout or anything like that just an updated and upgraded design so I work without designer Matt to come up with a refreshed version of the design and he turned the original design into this a massive difference with the design out of the way it was time to launch the thing Josh and I picked our launch date December 3rd and Josh and I teamed up to spread the word on launch day Josh focused on telling the story of how his startup got acquired after six months and he shared that story on the entrepreneur subreddit medium and hacker news my focus was letting the backlinko community know about exploding topics so I shared it on social media and sent out an announcement to backlinko email subscribers both approaches worked well and they complemented each other in fact someone from medium reached out to Josh to feature his story on their new maker blog which is pretty cool and all in all the backlinko community seemed to really like exploding topics so far so good but our biggest win and our biggest focus on launch day was product on we ended up getting number one product of the day on product hunt which is cool and it brought in quite a bit of traffic so all in all launch day went really well between the email list social media product hunt and medium we got 25,000 visitors on the first day which is kind of insane for a new site obviously traffic quickly started to drop after that but it didn't go to zero this is an important point back in the trend CEO days Josh go to a few traffic spikes for example when Rand Fishkin and Peter levels tweeted about it but that spike would quickly fade and traffic would then drop to practically zero this showed that people thought the tool was cool but it wasn't really developed enough to get long-term traction for that to happen we needed to make the tool better and do a coordinated launch which we did so what's the buzz of the launch started to die down we needed to figure out what are the next steps should we go hard with Facebook ads or focus on adding more topics or maybe we should write descriptions for the topics that we already have the options for our next step were pretty much endless which is good and bad it's good because it's fun to start something new from scratch it's bad because it's really easy to fall into the paralysis by analysis trap so instead of just randomly choosing a direction we decided to look at the feedback that people sent us during the launch and decided to prioritize that for example a lot of people complained that our search feature was broken it wasn't but it also wasn't really clear how it worked unlike with traditional search bar our searches for finding topics that are already in our database but that wasn't really obvious so Josh added a little error message that made this much more clear also a lot of people specifically requested in email newsletter in other words they didn't want to have to keep checking in to see if we added new topics they wanted them deliver to their inbox and the numbers back this up despite having a newsletter link buried in the footer of the site lots of people were still signing up for the newsletter so one of the first things we did was start a real newsletter called exploding topics Tuesday this newsletter is a curated list of our most interesting exploding topics plus insight and analysis so that's kind of where we are right now and in terms of future plans for exploding topics we have a few cool things in the pipeline first we need to add more sources how exploding topics works is that it monitor searches conversations and shopping results around the web and it identifies topics that are taking off so the more sources we source from the more topics we should be able to find second we need to improve the behind-the-scenes tech right now when it comes to the data that comes in the signal to noise ratio is out of whack which makes it harder for us to find legit topics that people can create content around so we need to improve the algorithm for sources that we already use so yeah that's it when it comes to exploding topics I realized the other day that I kind of launched this thing out of nowhere so I wanted to explain how this whole thing went down so you can learn from it if you liked this video make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel right now just click on the subscribe button also I'd like to hear from you do you have any feedback on how we can make exploding topics better if so I want to know so go ahead and leave a quick comment below right now