Henry Finn Built $2M/Year Video Production Company

Excerpt:

"So I had this hypothesis that if instead of making a simple portfolio site, if we actually made a blog and just shared dope art we love with the world, it might give people a reason to come back.

See, as artsy friends, we used to email each other all the coolest artists we found surfing the internet and would “ooh” and “aah” together. We were honestly quite snobby! We thought we had extremely good taste, lol. So I proposed instead of keeping it internal, we would share what we find in one place, a blog.

The rules were simple, we could share any kind of visual art in any medium, as long as there were no politics, the only rule was that the art had to be “dope.”

And so Empty Kingdom was born. (website now defunct)

I still remember to this day, the night of our “launch.”

We were sitting around with some beers asking each other how many visitors would it be nice to have by the end of the year. We thought a few thousand would be incredible.

We had no intention of “marketing” it, we would just create it and see what happened.

And within 11 months we got 1.8 million unique visitors that crashed our site multiple times (broke college students that didn’t have a penny for hosting). At our peak, I think we were reaching 5 million visitors a year.

The crazy part was this was with zero marketing. It was pure organic reach before organic reach was a term. We literally didn’t even bother announcing it to our friends and family. The internet found us, loved us, and shared with us. Our number one source of traffic was Stumbleupon."