The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2019
Trennd tops Hacker News with a free trend tool, then sells to Brian Dean in 6 months
A solo builder's free trend-spotting web app hit #1 on Hacker News, amassed 2,000+ subscribers, and sold pre-revenue to Brian Dean as Exploding Topics.
Trennd (now Exploding Topics)
What the business is
Trennd was a free web app that automatically monitored the web and Google Trends to surface rising topics early, packaged with a weekly newsletter for bloggers and indie makers.
How it started
In April 2019 Josh Howarth, living in Japan, wanted early signals of rising topics so he could ride big market trends, found no tool that provided them, and built one for himself - first as a CLI, then as a Next.js web app chosen partly for server-side rendering so the site could rank on Google. He listed it on Product Hunt's Ship service in early May at $80/month before it was finished (153 subscribers in two months), then discovered that the name Trend List belonged to an established design site and ran a public Twitter vote that chose Trennd; Pieter Levels voted in it.
What happened
A Reddit pre-launch seeded with 57 trends drew 500+ upvotes across three subreddits (80 email subscribers, 50 sign-ups and 1,000 visits); five weeks in, the list had 353 subscribers. The Show HN launch needed a moderator nudge because his account was too new, then briefly hit #1 on the front page - the free MongoDB tier buckled under 400 concurrent users and he upgraded mid-flood - and the wave, plus tweets from Rand Fishkin and Pieter Levels, pushed Trennd to 2,163 subscribers, 28,353 visitors and 124,026 pageviews. Monetization never landed: a premium tier stayed undefined, a $100-200/month private-dashboard request was dismissed as a dead end, and a sponsorship swap with Unreadit brought no cash.
How it ended up
About six months after he started, Backlinko's Brian Dean emailed out of the blue; after one call the pair agreed on an amount pegged to six months of a US-based engineer's salary multiplied by a traction factor, with Howarth keeping a stake. The product was renamed Exploding Topics and refocused on professional bloggers.
Background
Trennd was a free web app that automatically watched the web and Google Trends for rising topics, built by solo developer Josh Howarth in Japan in 2019 when he could not find a tool that did it. His bet was audience first: give the product away, grow an email list, and only later figure out how to charge.
The launch sequence was unusually public: a Reddit pre-launch that led with 57 curated trends drew 500+ upvotes across three subreddits, and a Twitter vote chose the name Trennd after the original Trend List collided with an existing brand. The Show HN launch briefly hit #1 on the Hacker News front page, and the follow-on wave from Twitter, Hacker Newsletter and Kottke.org pushed the mailing list to 2,163 subscribers with 124,026 pageviews.
Revenue never arrived. A premium tier stayed undefined, an offer of $100-200/month for a private dashboard was dismissed, and a sponsorship swap with Unreadit brought traffic but no cash. None of that stopped inbound interest: about six months in, Backlinko founder Brian Dean emailed, and after a single call the two agreed on a price sized to six months of a US engineer's salary times a traction factor, with Howarth keeping a stake.
The product was renamed Exploding Topics and repositioned for professional bloggers, where it still operates today. The case is a bootstrapped, pre-revenue exit built entirely on a voluntarily shared audience.
What has to be true
- The traction was specific and compounding: 2,163 email subscribers, 28,353 visitors and 124,026 pageviews after launch, with the list still growing during a month of zero marketing.
- The distribution bet worked before the monetization bet did: Reddit, HN, Twitter and newsletters carried a free product people could share without friction.
- The buyer was not a competitor but a distribution owner: Brian Dean had a large SEO audience, had acquired products before, and was paying for validated concept and attention, not revenue.
- Pricing the exit without revenue - six months of an engineer's salary times a traction factor - gave both sides a number they could agree on fast.
What can be applied
Audience is an asset before revenue: a free product people share voluntarily compounds attention, and that traction can be sold to a buyer who brings distribution.
Aftermath
The product lives on as Exploding Topics, focused on content marketers and SEO research. As of 2026-09-05 its homepage markets a database of 1.1M+ trends with Pro plans from $1.29/day, free keyword and SEO tools, and claims more than 1.1 million users, with trend-research articles still being published through August 2026. The source account ends at the 2019 acquisition, so current ownership and revenue are not documented here.
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