According to Inc, Spotify has announced that Steven Bartlett’s podcast, The Diary of a CEO, was its top business and tech podcast for 2025. It was also the platform’s second most popular podcast globally across all categories. The 33-year-old entrepreneur started the show from his spare room in 2017 with a $100 microphone and just 40 to 50 listeners per episode. Today, his 100-person media company, FlightStory, produces it, and the podcast has amassed 13.8 million subscribers on YouTube. Bartlett credits a major acceleration in 2020 to teaming up with producer Jack Sylvester to launch the show in video format.
The Experimentation Engine
Here’s the thing about Bartlett’s advice: it sounds like generic Silicon Valley hustle-culture, but he’s actually built a system around it. When he says you need to “fail at the same speed that the world is changing,” he’s not just talking philosophy. He’s institutionalized it. Mandating that every team member runs experiments and having dedicated Slack channels for “Failure and Experimentation” and marginal “1 Percent” gains turns a cliché into an operational mandate. It’s a way to force a large team to keep the scrappy, iterative mindset of a solo creator in a spare room. That’s harder than it sounds.
The Impartiality Play
His claim of being “politically impartial” is probably his most controversial and strategically brilliant move. In a media landscape choked with partisan shouting, positioning his show as a neutral platform is a massive differentiator. It’s why he can credibly host both Michelle Obama and Jordan Peterson. But “impartial” doesn’t mean shallow. Adding real-time context notes on screen is a clever tech-augmented solution to the “he said/she said” problem. It’s an attempt to build trust not through alignment, but through perceived transparency. Will everyone buy it? Of course not. But it clearly expands his potential guest list and audience pool dramatically.
From Audio to Video Empire
Let’s be real: the 2020 pivot to video wasn’t just an acceleration; it was the entire game. The podcast was growing, but YouTube is where the 13.8-million-subscriber empire was built. This highlights a brutal truth for modern creators: audio alone is rarely enough to reach a truly mass scale anymore. Video provides the charismatic visuals, the shareable clips, and the algorithmic fuel for discovery that pure audio platforms struggle to match. Bartlett didn’t just start a podcast; he built a multimedia content factory. The podcast is the core product, but the video arm is the growth engine and the primary revenue driver. It’s a blueprint others are desperately trying to copy.
The Long Game of Marginal Gains
So what’s the real lesson here? It’s the unsexy one. Consistency over years, a relentless focus on tiny improvements, and treating failure as data. It’s the exact opposite of the “viral overnight success” narrative. Bartlett started in 2017. He didn’t blow up until 2020, and it’s taken another five years to hit these Spotify zeniths. That’s an eight-year journey. His guests, he notes, share this pattern. It’s about building systems—for experimentation, for content, for team culture—that compound over time. The “Diary of a CEO” isn’t a diary of explosive, one-off wins. It’s a log of daily, incremental bets on a thousand different experiments. And right now, the data says it’s working.
