The Idea

Josh Howarth had a computer science degree from Imperial College London and a nagging conviction that the internet's most valuable information was hiding in plain sight. Trends were everywhere, but by the time anyone noticed them, the opportunity had already gone. The gold always got spotted after the rush.

So he built a tool to fix it. He called it Trennd, a scrappy app that scanned Google Trends data and surfaced rising topics before they went mainstream, sometimes months or years ahead. He wrapped a small newsletter around it. Roughly 2,500 people signed up. The problem: it made precisely zero money, the name was impossible to spell, and Josh was a solo developer running on limited finances.

Then, two days after his wedding in Japan, an email landed from Brian Dean, the SEO legend behind Backlinko. Dean loved the tool and wanted in. They struck a deal, Josh stayed on as co-founder with a stake, and the first order of business was killing the name.

This was the beginning of Exploding Topics.

The Execution

• 2019: Josh Howarth launches Trennd, a tool that monitors Google Trends and surfaces rising topics before they peak. It builds a newsletter of around 2,500 subscribers and generates no revenue.
• October 2019: Days after Josh's wedding, Backlinko founder Brian Dean emails out of the blue to say he loves the project. Because Trennd made zero money, they value the deal against what Josh would have earned as a developer over the build. He sells in and stays on as co-founder.
• 2020: First move post-deal is a rebrand. Trennd (a hard-to-share .co) becomes Exploding Topics on a clean, memorable .com, which Dean treats as priority number one.
• 2021: With Dean's audience and design muscle behind it, the weekly newsletter jumps from 2,500 to 55,000 subscribers, and the trend database gets a full redesign.
• By 2024: The company is doing roughly $3.2M in annual recurring revenue across three paid tiers running from $39 to $249 a month.
• July 2024: Exploding Topics pulls 1.61 million visits in a single month.
• 20 August 2024: Semrush acquires Exploding Topics for an undisclosed sum, with both Josh and Brian staying on. It is Dean's second exit to Semrush, after Backlinko sold for a reported ~$10M in January 2022.
• Today: Exploding Topics runs inside the Semrush App Center, feeding trend intelligence to marketers, founders and investors worldwide.

The lesson?

Distribution is the whole game. Josh built a tool that could genuinely see the future, and in his hands it made exactly zero money, because nobody knew it existed. The identical product, plugged into Brian Dean's audience and SEO machine, became a multi-million-dollar business bought by Semrush inside four years. Same code. Different reach. The idea wasn't the moat. The megaphone was.