Why Steven Bartlett's protégé says her 'Hot Smart Rich' podcast will be as big as 'Diary of a CEO'

• “Diary of a CEO” host Steven Bartlett is trying to turn his podcast company into a talent incubator.
• One protégé, “Hot Smart Rich” host Maggie Sellers Reum, described working in Bartlett’s orbit.
• She adopted Bartlett’s operational approach, but kept touches geared toward her female audience.

Jocelyn Florence, a consultant on creators for the management company Soft Shock, said operational support is key to this model working because the creator-founder is busy making their own content. It’s also important for the creator to have a well-defined brand that extends to the people they bring into their network.

“It’s easier to sell a brand on a more unified vision,” she said.

FlightStory has five shows featuring creators, in addition to “DOAC,” including Davina McCall, who speaks to the midlife experience, and relationships podcaster Paul Brunson. Its “Hot Smart Rich” deal is the only one structured as an equity investment, with Sellers Reum being the majority owner.

Applying the Bartlett playbook

Bartlett’s company has been applying its operational blueprint to grow Sellers Reum’s show, honing guest selection and amplifying the podcast through social media clips. FlightStory helped expand her guest list beyond her immediate network to include broader cultural figures such as entrepreneur Codie Sanchez and tech educator CatGPT.

There are some key differences between how “DOAC” and “Hot Smart Rich” operate, though.

One is the trailers. Instead of emphasizing the “hero’s journey” as Bartlett does with “DOAC,” “Hot Smart Rich” trailers focus on why the audience should care about the guest and what they’ll learn from the episode.

Sellers Reum also adapted Bartlett’s intensive pre-show research process for her female audience, but instead of calling the resulting 18-page document a “research brief,” she calls it a “gossip thread.”

“We’re trying to reclaim what it means to gossip for women,” she said. “Like, let’s gossip about things that make us hotter, smarter, and richer, not about other people. And so we call it a gossip thread. He calls it a research brief. For Maggie and ‘Hot Smart Rich,’ it’s a gossip thread.”

She’s also retained her interview style. Sellers Reum said while Bartlett’s are “expert-driven,” she positions herself as more conversational. She conducts her interviews from a comfy chair, legs folded, and always hits on the same five topics of money, power, relationships, business, and femininity.

“This is just more my gut; I feel that female voices in media are preferred by the female listener to be conversational,” she said. “If you look at ‘Giggly Squad,’ Amy Poehler, ‘Call Her Daddy,’ it’s actually like the viewer or the listener wants to hear the host’s opinion a lot more than what I’ve seen in male-dominated podcasts.”

When FlightStory proposed she do a Q&A-style show telling people how to solve their business problems, Sellers Reum pushed back.

“I said, ‘I can’t do that,’ because I’m not better than anyone that listens to me. I was investing $2,500 checks,” she said. “I wasn’t a billion-dollar founder.”

In the near term, she envisions launching a behind-the-scenes YouTube show. Long term, the plan is to expand “Hot Smart Rich” beyond the podcast and its WhatsApp community of fans whom Sellers Reum calls “angels,” potentially to books, TV shows, or products.

For now, the priority is growing the long-form podcast. She’d love to have guests like Alix Earle (who’s done a “phenomenal job” taking equity ownership in companies) or Reese Witherspoon (whose book club was “very underestimated”).

“There’s just such a big opportunity, but we have to earn the right to grow,” she said.