It was at this point that Trennd got the infamous “Hacker News hug,” and the site died. The free MongoDB Atlas database plan did not appreciate this flood of connections. I had a frantic 15 minutes where the website was down while I upgraded to the paid tier.

It’s a shame that I lost this quarter-hour of Hacker News prime time. I’ve since implemented some server-side caching that prevents the database from getting hammered.

But since I recovered quickly, we remained near the top of the front page for 12 more hours, which is good enough for me. Let’s not be greedy. 😛

I manned the comments section into the early hours of the morning and got some great discussion and a tremendous amount of positivity from the crowd.

Twitter bonanza

Just as I started to think everything was over and we were back to normality, the buzz started to spill over and have a huge domino effect onto Twitter.

Dozens and dozens of people tweeted about Trennd.

Thankfully, I’d updated the Twitter preview image beforehand. (Thank you Michael!). There was a pretty placeholder image and sweet description when dozens of people shared and tweeted about Trennd.

And then, the cherry on top of it all was that Rand Fishkin of Moz tweeted about it! Unbelievable! This made my month. 🍒

The number of likes and retweets on the back of this was insane. I’m a Twitter newbie, so to get this kind of exposure blew my mind! 🤯

It also led to us getting picked up by the Hacker Newsletter and Kottke.org, which drove some good traffic our way.

All this combined to rocket us above 2,000 email subscribers:

Subscribers: 2,163 🎉

Visitors: 28,353 🕵️‍♀️

Pageviews: 124,026 👀

It was really cool how ready people were to contribute and add trends of their own. It confirmed my hypothesis that we could crowdsource the surfacing of new trends to some extent, similar to how Product Hunt crowdsources new products.

But with this came the issue of quality control. One visitor, for example, added “donkey porn” as a new trend, and it may well be trending, but I had to moderate it away. 🤫

At this stage, I felt I’d truly validated interest in the project with more than 2,000 subscribers. Marketing to get another X-hundred subscribers wasn’t going to change anything.

I needed to make the platform more powerful, so I held off on a Product Hunt launch, thinking I’d keep that powder dry.

Monetization (or lack thereof)

I also started to think long and hard about how to monetize the site at this time. I needed it to at least pay some of its own bills and maybe even some of mine!

In the medium to long term, I knew a premium version of Trennd was the way to go.

But I couldn’t figure out what this should look like, and I wanted to do it right.

There’s no point damaging hard-earned goodwill by pushing out a rushed premium product too soon or something that’s the wrong fit.

Somebody did ask for a “private Trennd dashboard,” where they could favorite trends and get personal alerts. They even said they’d pay $100 to $200 per month for it. Turns out, they found Trennd immensely valuable to discover new programming languages sooner so they could make Udemy courses around them. (Being the first to get a course out and get good reviews is like a winner-take-all market and can be very profitable.)

But to me, all the value seems to be in the trends themselves and spotting hotter trends sooner, not the ability to put certain ones into a personal dashboard. Users would just use the free version! Plus, how many tech-course creators are out there? For better or worse (I think better!), I dismissed it as a dead end.

Instead, I began to look for a community or affiliate sponsor and started to have pricing conversations with people, even though I was still small fry in terms of traffic and a few thousand email subscribers.

I managed to set up a nice sponsorship “swap” with Unreadit (which is awesome—check it out!). That was a good fit that worked out well for both of us.

It drove a bit of traffic and some new subscribers and gave me some stats about how well Trennd sponsorship slots converted for future potential sponsors. But it didn’t bring in any cash money since it was just a swap.

Having that deal in place, however, did give me an excuse to scuttle back into my code cave. 🦀

Code cave

This was with the view to making Trennd more robust and sustainable for the long term.

The number one challenge was and still is the noise-to-signal ratio. Nobody wants to click through page after page of trends to find the ones that are relevant to them. They need to be able to slice and dice the trends in more ways and dimensions that are relevant to them.

I hunkered down in my little white room in our Japanese “mansion” (which in Japan basically means an apartment).

Sorry about the clutter. We’d just moved in when this was taken!

I added things like absolute search volume data and the ability to sort on it, more consistent categorization standards, and automatic classification of trends.

With the data granularity, you can see that the three-month chart data was weekly at first. Pretty crummy with only 12 data points.

But then below that, with daily data points, you can really see the difference.

Anyway, I’ll stop boring you with the various small additions and improvements I made over this time. Back to the story. 😛

Traction despite inaction

I’d done zero marketing for more than a month. 🤦‍♂️

The hype last month around the Hacker News launch and in the Twittersphere naturally died down, along with the web traffic.

It’s way too easy to put marketing on the back burner and keep building in general. That’s where I’m personally most comfortable.

But I know too well that marketing should be an ongoing crusade alongside product improvement.

The most successful indie hackers I see around have systemized routines that enable them to continually output valuable content.

But to my surprise, the mailing list count was still ticking up every day despite all this, and the site seemed to reach a healthy equilibrium of 100 to 300 daily visitors.

These were both big green flags to me. (I’m not sure if green flags are actually a real thing. Emojipedia doesn’t think so… 🚩)

Pieter Levels tweeted about us again out of the blue! This was several months after the first time and drove several thousands of visitors to the site.

Acquisition

All kinds of people had been putting themselves forward, asking to get involved. And this was happening on a semiregular basis!

The problem is that co-founders bring a huge amount of risk with them—differences in vision, work ethic, and so many other things.

They’re big unknowns, so I’d decided to stick by myself and the devil I know.

That is, until I received the following email from:

I thought I recognized that name. Googling Brian Dean… Oh, snap!

Yep, it’s Brian Dean of Backlinko.com 😮

More Googling. Interesting—he’s acquired things before. I don’t think he’s joking around.

My wedding was just days prior, and we were off to Okinawa for four days, so my call with Brian had to wait. Best to play hard-to-get anyway. 😜

Then, one call and one hour, 21 minutes, and 31 seconds later — we had a deal.

And we literally shook hands over Skype video! 🤝

As for the acquisition number, that’s why you’ve read this far, right?!

It’s really difficult to put a price on something that’s not making any money yet. Well, actually it’s not. Most people would just say $0. And traffic was growing but spiky and low in an absolute sense.

But at the same time, we were massively excited by the potential, and the concept was partially validated and derisked given the initial traction obtained.

We settled on an amount equivalent to how much I’d earn as a U.S.-based engineer working six months and then multiplied by X for the traction/success factor already achieved. And I still have a stake in the project going forward.

So I can’t retire yet, but it’s a huge win!

The main thing is that now I don’t have to worry quite so much about paying rent every month, and I can start to think more big picture in general.

And perhaps even more important, it provides validation to myself (and my wife!) that I can keep working on these “projects” of mine and not get a “real job” just yet.

To be honest, I didn’t know if I was just crazy and wasting my time for six months.

To my Japanese in-laws, I was the slightly strange, unemployed “freeter” at home on my computer all day.

I have to say, writing during the process made a huge difference. It keeps you sane as a solo founder and allows you to track your own progress at a high level.

Also, being as open as possible and sharing metrics such as subscriber growth, traffic, and revenue helped attract support and keep me accountable when it was only me working on it.

And overall, this all helped create a story around the product, without which people don’t have reason to care.

What’s next

It’s awesome to have Brian behind the project now. This is fantastic news for Exploding Topics. He’s a massive name in the SEO industry, of course, but he’s also a super-smart guy who really knows his stuff and enables us to take the project to the next level.

He has a great instinct for direction, based on years of experience and success online. This includes his “headache detector,” as he calls it, which can foresee potential problems way further in advance than I can.

We’ve also fast-forwarded to putting new features in front of Brian’s huge audience to see what they think.

I no longer need to grow Trennd’s audience via a trend community/discussion platform slowly over months and years while also trying to wrestle with product-market fit.

Instead, we can focus on building a better product. This means the core value of trend discovery and getting people hotter trends faster.

To this end, we’ve been able to refocus on the backend. Now we monitor way more places on the internet as sources for interesting new topics and keywords across health, business, marketing, fashion, and more.

We’ve also decided to niche down. This is a vital step and something I’d been sweating and delaying for several months. But with Brian’s help, this is something we’ve been able to move forward on.

The problem is there are so many different potential customers: indie makers like me looking for their next project idea, investors looking for a company stock pick, affiliates seeking the next hot product, or people just seeking to feed their curiosity.

We’ve settled on professional bloggers.

These writers are our new focus, because they constantly need fresh content ideas across a range of categories to write about. And if they’re one of the first to write about an exploding topic, that makes a huge difference to their results.

They also potentially make for good customers. (Even though we don’t have our premium version yet!) It’s still good to choose a nice market where people immediately “get” the product and are willing to pay for it if it provides value.

This market has proven itself before too, as Nathan Barry of ConvertKit said about going from $1,000 to $10,000 MRR:

Niche down as small as possible. Going from a generic email marketing company to “email marketing for professional bloggers” was critical. (Source)

We’ve renamed it, too. I know, I know. I’ve already rebranded from Trend List to Trennd, and now we’re doing it again? But hear me out.

This product spreads by word of mouth very well.

But try telling your friend, “Check out Trend, but with two Ns. Oh, and it’s .co, not .com.” Not good. 😅

So we’ve gone with ExplodingTopics.com.

Lovely. Easy to remember. Easy to spell. Has a balanced look on paper, too, but maybe that’s just me.

And the word “topics” aligns better with our new target audience.

Plus, we now have a sweet new design. I feel it’s much more intuitive and way sexier in general. 🤩