I Built Two $1M+ Companies — Here Are the 5 Marketing Strategies Behind Both

I built not one but two companies to millions of dollars of revenue and sold them both. My secret? It wasn't any specific marketing tactic or fad. Instead, I focused on five core digital marketing strategies. And yes, these are still working great in 2026. So if you're ready to learn digital marketing from someone that's actually done it

keep watching. The first strategy that probably made the biggest difference was strategy number one. Treat distribution as part of the product. Thanks to AI and no-code and low-code it's never been easier to build something. There are literally hundreds of tools coming out every single day. It's crazy. Which means the real challenge now isn't building something, it's getting people to notice. But a mistake I see a lot of founders make is they still spend 90% of their time on their product and only about 10% of the time on distribution. That ratio didn't work before AI and it definitely doesn't work now. In fact, distribution has to be something that you're thinking about as you're creating and developing your product. example of this is how we launched my SaaS company Exploding Topics. We didn't just ship the product and hope that people would find it. We had a coordinated launch plan from before we even finished building it. For example

we launched on Product Hunt. And before launch day, I was active in the community to make sure people recognized our name when we actually launched. Then on the day we launched, I personally DM'd dozens of people in my network and asked them to comment on and share the launch. That push helped us become product of the day and product of the week, which brought in 25,000 visitors in the first week, which is just insane for a new site. The next

thing we did was remove friction. Exploding Topics has a lot of proprietary data that we easily could have hidden behind a sign-up form. But instead, we made the experience completely open. You could land on the site and browse trends without even needing to create an account. That made it much easier for people to share it and a lot of influential people did. And finally, we tapped into our existing assets for distribution. Now, if you don't have an audience yet, this might mean messaging people you know or just reaching out one by one to people that you're connected to on social media. In my case, I had an email list, so I sent the launch to that list and got the product in front of a large group of people on day one. The key here is that we did all this at the same time. Not one tactic this week and another tactic the next week. It was a coordinated push that created a lot of buzz on day one. Now, the interesting thing is after that launch, I naively thought could just coast on that launch forever. But that's not what happened, which is where the next strategy comes in. Strategy number

two, build marketing assets that compound. After our initial launch, traffic to Exploding Topics started to nosedive. It was above the old baseline but not by much. Things really only started to pick up again when we executed this second strategy. Create marketing assets that compound. I'll explain. A lot of people think of marketing in terms of campaigns. I don't. Instead, I creating assets that compound and become more valuable over time. Here's a real-life example to explain what I mean. With Exploding Topics, the free tool itself was an asset. It was publicly available and people could easily try it and share it. But we knew that the tool was cool but it probably wasn't enough. So we started creating data-driven pages that could attract traffic, links, and social shares. One of the best examples of this is a page we created on how many users ChatGPT has. Whenever OpenAI raises a funding round or Sam Altman mentions usage numbers in an interview, we update the page with the latest data.

As you can see, this is not rocket science, especially if you compare this to doing one of those big industry studies where you survey thousands of people or scrape millions of data points. I've done those, they have their place, but they're a lot of work. But with an asset like this, we're simply maintaining the most accurate public source for that information. — And it's worked insanely well. This single page has been cited thousands of times and has brought in tens of thousands of visitors. It's been referenced by Forbes, Fast Company, Fortune, scientific journals, and even the UK government. The reason it works so well is because this asset compounds over time. Every time the page gets cited or linked to, it becomes more visible in search and in tools like ChatGPT, which leads to more citations, more links, and more visibility. So the big takeaway from this is simple. Instead of relying on campaigns that just stop working as soon as you stop working on them, focus on building assets that generate more traffic, more leads, and more customers over time. And

once you get that traffic, it's time for strategy number three, which is to build your email list. Email is something that's getting slept on right now because everyone's obsessed with AI. But if you want reliable access to your audience, email is the best channel that you can build by far. And there isn't even a close second. Social media is great, I know. I built a YouTube channel to around 500,000 subscribers, so I'm obviously a fan of using social media. But the real key is turning that audience into email subscribers. Because when someone follows you on a platform like LinkedIn or Instagram, you're really renting that follower. One algorithm change and overnight you could lose access to all of your followers. But with an email list, you own the distribution. For example, at Exploding Topics about half of our MRR has come directly from our email list. Sometimes it was from sending useful content in our weekly newsletter and sometimes we ran promotions directly to the list. And

when we ran those same promotions on social media, they didn't have a small percentage of the impact. Email just consistently outperformed every single channel for us. And this became even clearer when I sold Exploding Topics to Semrush. When we were negotiating the sale, they never even asked about our social media followers, they were all about the email list. How big the email list was and how engaged it was. And that ended up playing a huge role in how they evaluated the business. So if you haven't started building an email list, now is the time. And if you've been neglecting it, it's probably time to start doubling down on email. Because you'll never hear a successful founder say that they spent too much time building their email list. And now

it's time for strategy number four, create something people can't stop sharing. Thanks to generative AI tools, it's never been easier to create content. But creating great content, that's a different story. In fact, a mistake I see a lot of founders make with content marketing is trying to scale too soon, too fast. They decide that they need to publish a new YouTube video every week, a podcast every single day, or in B2B SaaS, thousands of articles that target long-tail keywords. But that's not what we did at Exploding Topics. Instead of pumping out tons of content, we decided to focus on creating great content that stood out. For example, our writers would spend about 20 hours creating detailed reports on trends in industries like e-commerce — and health care. These were deep dives, data-driven reports that were generally useful and unique. Yes, these pages brought in traffic, but more importantly, they brought in high-quality leads, trials, and customers. If I had just followed that generic strategy of creating hundreds of posts targeting long-tail keywords, it probably wouldn't have worked. Now, this isn't an excuse to procrastinate or make sure everything's perfect before publishing. Instead, you just want to ask yourself, is your content actually something special in the entire ecosystem of content that already exists on this topic? Because today, scale isn't a competitive advantage anymore. With AI, you can push a button and produce 500 articles or YouTube video scripts. The advantage comes from actually creating something that people want to see and share. Which

brings us to our last strategy, strategy number five, become known for one specific thing. Now, I haven't talked much about branding yet because the other stuff I covered is honestly just more important. Even if you don't have the strongest brand, if you're building your email list and bringing in targeted traffic to your site, you're probably going to do well. But a strong brand can still help you really stand out. A good example of this is the AI content writing space. It feels like overnight there are dozens, maybe hundreds of tools that supposedly help you write better than what you can get out of ChatGPT or other AI tools. In fact, I went to a conference recently and I would say almost half of the people there had some sort of AI writing tool that they're working on. And the problem was none of them could explain what made their product unique. Now, of course, everyone's going to say that their product is the best. But none of them stood out for one specific thing. And today, with so many product launches, it's more important than ever to be known for one specific thing, even if that means niching down. For example, after we launched Exploding Topics, we considered getting into the investing space. A lot of our users were traders, hedge funds, and investors who wanted more investing tools. But we decided not to go down that path. There already tons of investing platforms out there, which would make it harder for us to stand out. Instead, we stuck to our core identity, which was finding trends early on. And there's a bonus to this kind of hyper-specific positioning. When you're strongly associated with one specific thing, it helps you stand out in people's minds, but it also helps you show up in LLMs. Because over time, your brand gets associated with that specific concept or entity. For example, when you ask tools like ChatGPT something like, "What's the best tool for finding trends? " Exploding Topics comes up again and again. So yeah, those are the five digital marketing strategies that have helped me get a little bit of success. And look, I

get it. It can be easy to be distracted by the latest AI tool that comes out every week. But honestly, the people that crush it at digital marketing tend to do the fundamentals best. Not those that chase whatever shiny new object comes up in front of them. So the only thing left to do is go out there and execute.