Steven hosts Diary of a CEO, one of podcasting's biggest shows, and is co-founder of Flight Studio — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
Steven Bartlett was speaking to Spotify Podcast Product Director Austin Lamon at Podcast Movement 2024 in Washington DC. Original audio courtesy of Podcast Movement. Podcast Movement Evolutions is Mar 31-Apr 3 in Chicago IL, USA. We’ve condensed Austin’s questions for flow.
Austin Lamon: Stephen, welcome to Podcast Movement. So, you started in September 2017-ish. Now, you publish twice a week, every week without fail, with major guests. How has the industry changed over that period? And what’s gonna happen next?
Steven Bartlett: When I started the podcast, I’ll never forget a gentleman who actually just spoke to you backstage on my phone, explaining to me why podcasts would absolutely never make money. And I remember, but I remember someone saying that to me when I started my social media marketing business. I remember them sitting me down at Google campus in London and writing out the math to prove to me that this business would never make money. But in my mind, I think like value comes up, the commercialization comes after the value. So if you just focus on making something that people like, then the commercial model will eventually catch up. And that’s has been certainly been the case with podcasting.
When I started, I didn’t actually know you could make money from doing a podcast. And it turns out that wasn’t true.
What really changed the game for us was when we became consistent and when we started videoing the podcast. That is, I can basically map it as the inconsistent audio only three years, where the downloads are about 1,000 people a month. And then I can map the moment when we started getting consistent and it goes up to about 40 million people a month. And it’s like, it’s like flat consistency. And it turns into like the Burj Khalifa, the graph. It’s the most incredible thing I’ve seen. But that’s the power of compounding consistency.
What’s changed in the industry? if you’re not videoing your podcast, you’re really at just a huge competitive disadvantage. And I could explain all the mechanics as to why you’re at such a huge competitive disadvantage. But as you all know, growing a podcast is impossibly hard. And the reason why you video it isn’t just because you wanna be on YouTube or you wanna be on Spotify video, it’s because you need the clips.
The clips are, if you think about an hour-long episode of a podcast, if I get 10 clips from that, you should view that as 10 front doors into my podcast.
And I think the big mindset shift we need to go on now to really capture the next wave of opportunity is to no longer think of your podcast as a podcast. Your podcast is the same as a show on Netflix or on YouTube or on TV. It’s the same thing.
And if you start thinking about that, your strategy completely changes because I want my podcast to be on every screen in the world.
I almost never refer to my podcast as a podcast. Only when I’m at things like this. But in my mind, I think it’s important for the framing that it’s a show. And then when you just start saying that to your team, you treat it differently.
AL: I love that. What sort of experimentation goes into that? How do you think about from episode to episode, what sort of changes are you making? How are you constantly learning and growing and evolving and experimenting with the content itself?
SB: I think one of the most, maybe the most important principle of the growth of The Diary of a CEO, but just generally the growth of the businesses I’ve been involved in, is assuming you don’t know the right answer. And then trying to kill guessing at all instances where people start guessing.
And this is difficult for a lot of people because we’re romantic. We’re creatives, right? So we’re romantic about how we think things should be done. But you will be more successful the less you guess.
That means that the single most uttered words in our company are experimentation. Maybe the second most uttered phrase in our company is 1%. And those two things kind of have a relationship, which means we will experiment and test everything.
In the podcast, we have almost 50 people now. Technically in the team, it’s about 65, if you look at our Slack channel, but about 50 of them work on the podcast.
And we have, in the team, we have a full-time data scientist. We test everything. We built a tool called PreWatch, where a thousand people watch my episodes before they go out and it uses the camera on their laptop to see if they’re paying attention. And when they look away, we get that data. If they hit the space bar, it means they found that part interesting.
You take that, you send it to the editors. The editors then can edit the podcast so that it’s highly retentive. If it’s highly retentive, the algorithm loves it, it shows it to more people. Because retention is one of the key factors across all platforms, and I’m pretty sure it’s a key factor on Spotify’s chart as well.
Everything, we test everything. If the level of CO2 in a room gets above a thousand parts per million, there’s a Guardian article that shows it’s equivocal to having a pint of beer to your cognitive performance as an interviewer, but also as a speaker. And I remember having a conversation with a breath expert, he pulled out his CO2 monitor and hid it on the table and goes, we’re at 1,500 parts per million. So our performance in this interview right now is gonna dip significantly. I was reading that Guardian article a couple of days ago, and it said in the workplace, when they did tests on people, if the CO2 levels got high, your cognitive performance was 50% worse than another group of people who were in a well-ventilated room.
We have a magic trackpad glued under the table, and every time the guest says something interesting, I raise my thumb, it hits the trackpad, it takes what they’ve said, saves it, and we test that over and over again to see if that’s the right framing for this conversation.
I could go on the color of the thumbnail, the use of quotation marks. I can tell you that an exclamation mark at the end of the title gives me 0.2% extra click through. We probably, there’s thousands of things. I think every episode before it goes out is tested in 400 different ways.
I just want to remove guessing from the process. So the end-to-end process of producing a podcast, my job, and our team’s job, is to not be romantic, to remove guessing.
And yeah, and it’s funny, because I always can feel the reaction to this, right? Because I’m violating some people’s romance. And here’s another way to think about it. Imagine if you had an unbelievable podcast episode, right? And the only reason that millions of people didn’t get to hear it, is because at one stage in the relay race of getting that podcast out, something wasn’t tested, the title was wrong, the thumbnail was wrong, and because of that, there was a 1,900% variance in the amount of people that clicked it.
I have seen that.
So guessing is, I think, a harm against the great thing that you’ve produced. We just want to give our stuff the best possible chance.
AL: How do you actually do the research in about the guest itself? You’re always quoting studies, you’re so well researched. What’s that process look like?
SB: I learned this from watching a clip of Joe Rogan one time, is that if you start spending too much attention on what your audience want, you will essentially lose your way. And the only sustainable way for me to build a great show is for me to continue doing the thing I did when I started, which is pursuing my own curiosity. And that’s why that circle is non-negotiable of what I’m interested in.
If I wake up in the morning and I look at my diary, and it says you’re filming a podcast conversation with insert name, and I’m excited, then we have been successful as a team.
But if I ever have a prolonged period in a row where I wake up in the morning and I look, oh, you’ve got another bloody gut microbiome expert. (audience laughing) And we’re doing this for the views.
If that was to happen in my life for a month in a row, I would be so done with podcasting. And that’s why you just have to love it if you want to go far.
So, I end up sitting down and I get a 20, 30 page document from my team, which has all this data in the first five, six pages. The next 15, 20 pages are information, first party research on this person, lots of information on their previous interviews, and then we’re doing a lot of experiments at the moment in the conversation.
Our big thing, and the reason why I said the second most popular phrase in our office is 1%, is if I focus my team on all the tiny little ways that we can make this podcast better.
Props, CO2, whatever it might be, an exclamation mark on the title. This amazing thing happens.
I’m friends with a guy called Sir David Brailsford who’s now running Manchester United in terms of performance. He was previously in the British cycling team. He took that down and out British cycling team, as it says in the book, Atomic Habits, and made them the very, very best in the world. He’s a very good friend of mine. I’ve spoken to him many, many times over the last weeks, and I’d go to the games and watch Manchester United with him a few times. And his big thing is about marginal gains, right? Everybody knows that, the 1% stuff.
But what’s more interesting is the part that most people don’t realize, which is he said to me, when I started focusing my team on these marginal gains, they suddenly felt like we were going somewhere. And this speaks to the psychological momentum of small wins.
Harvard Business Review asked thousands of people to keep work diaries. And then at the end of the study, they said, point to the day you had the best day in work. Everybody pointed to a day in their diary where they had a feeling of progress.
So what does this tell you?
It means that if you focus your team, not on finding a new podcast hosting platform, some big innovation over here, on stacking 1%, they will feel like they are going somewhere. They’ll be more engaged with the mission.
And then, you know, the big thing for us is we share all of those 1% with everybody. We feel like we’re winning every day because Jemima posts in the Slack channel that she’s changed the air freshener in the studio. And everyone– [APPLAUSE] –that actually happened. She changed the candle in air freshener in the studio. And she told everyone in Slack, because we have a culture of being more petty than our competition. And that’s why you laugh. And that’s why we’ll win. Because we’re more petty than you are. We are. We sweat the small stuff more than you do.
For more guests like these, Podcast Movement Evolutions is Mar 31-Apr 3 in Chicago IL, USA. Tickets are available now.