How Steven Bartlett's FlightStory are building billion-dollar creator brands with CEO Georgie Holt

0:00Ian Shepherd:In today's episode, I sit down with Georgie Holt, CEO of Flight Story and co-founder of Flight Story Studio. This is the company building the future of media for the creator age alongside Steven Bartlett. Our belief at Flight Story in the media side is the next billion dollar media companies will be scared out of singular human IP. Georgie reveals the philosophy behind the explosive growth of Diary of a CEO. Rigorous experimentation and commitments to the 1%. Testing and experimenting with marginal improvements, marginal changes to get data back. We did a calculation on last year and it was way over a thousand experiments that were run.

0:38Ian Shepherd:And she gives a glimpse into how AI is already transforming their workflow. I think we built 48 tools that saved us seven years of time. This is an ambitious company, a defining moment for creator-led media and an episode you absolutely do not want to miss.

1:00Ian Shepherd:So what is Flight Story and what are you building today? Flight Story is a media and investment company. We co-founded it with Stephen Bartlett. A lot of people will probably know who he is. Iconic host of The Diary of a CEO, the second biggest podcast globally. Obviously, very well-known and recognized investor and entrepreneur. And we met him about two years ago, following on from a LinkedIn post, where he said he was looking to build a podcast network. And was anyone out there would be interested in doing that with him? And what began as sort of a podcast media and technology company built on the blueprint of scaling the diary of a CEO and the methodologies and technology that had been used to do that has become a media company, which really is about elevating human stories that inspire progress.

1:43That is the fundamental function of our media business. And we really want to build the future of media for the creator age. And we'll definitely get into this, I think, about what I mean by that and what we think that potential opportunity is. But how we see it with the creator age or certainly how I see it, I've been in media a very long time now. I'm coming up to, I think, my 25th anniversary in media, which is, I think, a genuine lifetime in this industry. And I've seen unbelievable transformation from print to digital, digital to social, social to video. and the decline of legacy and the rise of the creator.

2:19And our belief at Fly Story in the media side is the next billion dollar media companies will be scaled out of singular human IP or more sort of obviously known as creator-led brands. So that's what we're building. And we are moving away from calling ourselves a podcast company to a media company that scales creator-led brands that help people pursue a more fulfilling life.

2:42Ian Shepherd:Really excited to get into it. and also to hear about the power of LinkedIn there. Yes. But in your words, how would you define a creator-led media company in 2025? It's a great question. I think it's where content becomes a company and a lot of people out there are creating content. A lot of people are doing that with some success, but what we kind of find is there comes a moment where, whilst we talk about the legacy media industry sort of being in catastrophic decline and sort of trying to figure out what's next and where they go from here, the creator economy is also broken. And that's because many of them rely on AdSense dollars.

3:21They're sprinting to keep still just in terms of producing more and more content to try and drive more and more views. The brand deals are maybe small and disparate. It's hard to connect all of the pieces together. They're maybe bouncing between agents and publishers and strategists and marketers and people who are all kind of coming into the ecosystem to help them perhaps expand, but not into one cohesive flywheel and system and sort of creating full infrastructure around them. So I think it's this moment in time where content can start to look and feel like a company, where you're maybe employing more people, you're looking to expand beyond potentially just producing on a singular channel, you're looking for decentralized distribution, you're looking at products, merchandise, events, community activations, and you're starting to do and feel and experience the activities that are brand-like.

4:13And I feel very passionately that there is a lot of disproportionate difficulty in the creator economy right now. And we are building this company, this future of the creator ages, to put this infrastructure from media experts into what we think is this creator-led media moment.

4:32Ian Shepherd:Makes absolute sense. And when you meet a creator, how do you evaluate whether they're a potential million or even billion dollar business? Again, a great question. It's about having the founder mentality. And we're very lucky to be connected to and to work with lots of very high profile individuals who've built very credible careers in entertainment and in media. But there's something very special about a creator, content creator or media talent who think about the media side of their business like a founder. And that means that they have to be obsessed, absolutely obsessed with what they're building.

5:07They have to have an absolute bias for action. They have to be thinking about the commercial economics of what they're building, not just the creative side of the business. They have to be extremely detailed around what they want to achieve, where they want to go. The fact that they will be contributing to it massively themselves. It's not just they sort of turn up, record and leave. It's them being present in every conversation and every part of the ecosystem, just like Stephen is. Stephen is present, engaged and driving results in his media business and the driver's CEO in such a way that I've never experienced before.

5:45His entrepreneurial vision, his founder mentality is translated into media. So we have to see those same behaviors in our creators so much. So we built a culture test for our for people joining our company. and it really is finding out how aligned you are to our way of working in an entrepreneurial company led by someone like Stephen surrounded by lots of other founders both as an investment portfolio but also in the media side we have to know that you're going to thrive in that environment and you're going to really enjoy it because it's not typical but it is extremely worthwhile pursuit so we do this culture test just to understand whether there's an alignment are you going to enjoy it here is there something for you we've actually started to do that with creators now as well to see how much of the alignment with our business, our values and our behaviors is coming through in the creators.

6:30And we've just signed a creator that we're going to announce in two weeks who scored like 98 % on the culture test. And we're like, well, this is such an interesting indication that this person is going to not only thrive, but enjoy how we do things because it isn't typical. It's very lean in. It's very active. And it's really about pursuit of this audacious goal that we think we can build billion dollar media companies with creator led brands. And that takes obsession.

6:56Ian Shepherd:It's fascinating to hear about that test you have. How do you think about managing the key person risk though when you're investing into a creator? Yeah it's something we think about all the time. It's something we're highly aware of in our company. When we do our risks on ops on any sort of strategic document it's always key person, key man risk. You know how would we operate our business and our company should something happen to one of the creators that we work with. Again, that's why we're very specific on who we want to work with and why we choose them. So we use a lot of data in that decisioning.

7:27But ultimately, this is where the creator must be building a brand and a media brand, something that could and can in distribution across short form and long form community and events can have the principles of that creator live beyond the person themselves. So we think about what are the key pillars? What are the brand codes? What is the experience that an audience will have with this at every touch point that should the creator not be there they're still having an interaction with a brand that has those key principles and persona of that creator built within it so we're really looking towards like a media brand execution the diary of a ceo we need to talk begin again the line whilst they're creator led the brand codes are extremely strong and they should be have residuals that pay in all different environments whether you're watching something in short form long form and going to a community event so we're really looking at what is the brand we can build around this iconic persona, which their principles can then live on just in case.

8:28Ian Shepherd:And I know Stephen uses a lot of data. How do you use data to identify creators in what you're doing? Yeah, we're building tools, actually. There's a great quote by Alex Hormozzi, and he says that founders and builders, they build for three reasons. One, the first reason, which has probably brought me to the seat, is you're professionally very good at something. You've built a deep skill set and you're able to then sort of build companies and tools and services for others because you've learned a skill and a craft over a very long period of time. There's people who are purpose and passion builders who are deeply in love with an idea or an opportunity.

9:03And they want to build businesses and products, tools and services that kind of speak to that passion. Then there's pain builders, people who are experiencing deep pain with a product service, health concern, health condition, lifestyle choice. And they build to reduce the pain that they feel in themselves because something is difficult when it shouldn't be. And Steve's a pain builder. So he builds through pain. so he'll be like this is frustrating this is too slow there's too much human effort going into this when I want human beings spending time on complex human problems building networks relationships opportunities brainstorming for the future moving ahead at pace and you're solving this sort of complex difficult in the moment problem and I think I can build a tool for that I think I can build technology that solves that for us faster or certainly gets us a significant part of that problem solved and then the human beings can come and debate and discuss.

9:56So what we now have is a tool called Creator Radar, which is taking out the human bias, because quite often that's what happens when you're making decisions, to give us the right signals in the noise that will help us understand whether we think a creator is at a high potential moment. And that was actually built on the technology of a tool called Guest Radar, which is finding the optimum guests for the driver CEO and all of our new shows without using human bias by using data. Because the reality is, and the truth of it is, the guest choice probably, I kind of think about where does it start and where does it end when you're producing something like a podcast or a show or a piece of IP like this.

10:35And it starts with the guest. It starts with that choice. So that is a seismic decision you make twice a week on the die of a CEO. and when you get the right guest into the seat, they can have a transformative impact, not just on the success of the show in terms of views, subscribers, revenue. It can have a profound impact on the audience. It can genuinely change someone's life and we have thousands and thousands and thousands of emails and messages to say that that exact thing has happened. It can also transform the guest's life as well. I think Daniel Priestley was widely quoted. He's been on the Diary of a CEO two to three times now, and he said he would have paid£20 million to go on the Diary of a CEO for the impact, the positive impact it's had on his business.

11:23So we have to almost remove human bias from that decision because we know this unbelievable impact it has. So we built a tool called Guest Radar that is searching the internet, searching every channel we can possibly pull into this API to pull into this tool to tell us what the potential outcome of a guest or a human being would be on the show. And it gives it a rating of potentiality and a percentage score. And we can see that someone is going to have a very high potential impact based on lots of different signals that we're looking for. and we have some unbelievable examples, particularly in the health and science sector where people aren't as renowned.

12:02They aren't as high profile. They don't have huge Instagram followings. They don't have huge sort of creator-led brands that we can sort of look at and say, well, that's got scale. I'll bring an audience with them. They are, I think we've got someone on the diary of a CEO today who has 600 followers on Instagram.

12:17Ian Shepherd:Very different. And it's because the data signals have told us that this person coming on has extremely high potential of being a transformative guest. So I'm so interested to see whether someone with such a small foothold in where we were traditionally said are the important areas, which is a high social media presence, will perform. Wow, I love that passion that you described there and the impact. I actually know Daniel Priestley. I met him about 10 years ago and I've seen his sort of rapid rise, particularly in the last year. And can you talk us through your portfolio and some of the creators that you're working with at the moment?

12:50Yeah, absolutely. We are taking a very curated approach to the creators that we work with. I've worked with other companies where it's a scale play. It's about signing as many creators or shows or pieces of IP to your network that you possibly can, hedging your bets, scaling what you can scale. Then you have a long tail that quite often are sort of disappointed in the servicing they may get because they've got a mismatch of expectations. We're taking a very curated approach. The ambition is to have around 15 to 20 creators, creator-led brands by the end of 2030. And the reason we're making that choice is we want people to have an unbelievable experience when they work with Flight Story, that it's incredibly intentional, it's incredibly well-staffed, very well-serviced, that they have essentially an entire team of maybe 20 to 30 to 50 people.

13:39I mean, the Diary of a CEO has about 50 people working on it now. That's the scale that we know we can get to. So Stephen, as the Diary of a CEO, we're talking about that being easily$150 million,$200 million brand today. And the projections that will have taken us into the future will be have a billion dollar valuation on its own within the sort of next two to three years. So, you know, that's the opportunity ahead of them. So 20 creators. I like to kind of think, and this is where my legacy experience comes to play. And I mean that with both. I mean that with love as well. legacy to me also means that someone who's had an unbelievable tenure and has delivered unbelievable results and it's something that we all admire and look up to.

14:18I kind of look at it like Condé Nast where you have this like you just know it's Condé Nast the moment you touch, feel, see or engage with any of that content and each brand has a unique perspective on the world but the aesthetic and the premium nature of that brand is very similar. So you know that if you're Wired or Vanity Fair, GQ or Vogue, you know they're a Condé Nast brand. And that's the intention, that we're building the next Condé Nast or we're building the next Disney, as sort of Stephen is doing with Stephen.com and his pursuit of that is that these are very trusted, well-understood, well-curated brands versus bringing on hundreds and hundreds of channels and just sort of hedging the bets almost like a fund and sort of seeing which one will be successful over time.

15:07Ian Shepherd:You've started working with creators. Are there particular patterns that show up amongst the ones that are successful? They have all been successful. So the benchmark we had, I mean, when we met Steve the first time, when we were talking about launching the network before it was Flight Story and previous to that Flight Studio, it was the great experiment. was what the team had done at the Diary of a CEO this unbelievable achievement of scaling this brand to the levels it had been done through ruthless experimentation commitments to the one percent commitments to data decisioning commitments to killing the guesswork that's one of our mantras in the business and the commitment to not being romantic about what had got them to the point and how it's going to get them into the future repeatable could you repeat it or was it something that could only have been done in that moment in time with that particular team in that context.

15:58So we're always benchmarking ourselves against where the driver CEO was on the journey of our new shows. So that's the qualification we use. And we need to talk with Paul C. Brunson, which I think is now, it began as a relationships podcast, but it's transformed into, I think, an iconic, the iconic talk show of our time, where very high profile people are going on and sharing personal stories and personal journeys of progress like they haven't shared anywhere else in the world yet. To give you an indication, we did a record with Kerry Katona, who for anyone not knowing who she is when she listens, she's like an iconic pop star in the UK and has sort of moved into, I'd say, sort of celebrity culture and reality TV.

16:38She did a nine-hour podcast record. Nine hours. And he sat with her without judgment, curious, interested, empathetic, and she shared things she'd never shared anywhere. So we've created this unbelievable space for human connection with Paul. His show is growing nine times faster than the diary of his CEO was at that moment in time. So we're about 14 months into that show now. Nine times faster, 600 million views across long form and short form, millions of followers across YouTube and social. He's about to go back to the US because he is American. He's going back to the US to a big recording sprint there.

17:15He's going to be on a very high profile American TV show. So his sort of journey is exploding again. And what I love so much about Paul is he is a man like I am in my lifetime in the second act of life. You know, he's not 25 and sort of the next top thing. You know, he is in his, I think, late 40s, similar to me, and has found, again, this opportunity to bring his expertise, to bring his brand to a global audience. So it's not about age. It's not about you being, you know, the next big TikToker. It's about us having great data points because we have unbelievable data from you being a guest on the show.

17:54Like any investment fund, this is someone we want to invest in because we've done the right diligence about who you are and what we think you can be.

18:00Ian Shepherd:Got it. And how do you build the right teams and infrastructure around the creators that you're investing in? I think of teams as sort of building blocks to an outcome. And we've spent a long time thinking about what our business is in 2030 and what building blocks we need from a team point of view to get us to that ultimate goal, which is to have a billion dollar valuation and to be reaching a billion people globally with the content that we create and for that content to be inspiring progress in the people it does reach. We think about the building blocks. You need those foundational building blocks.

18:34You need those innovation blocks. You need those audience and community driving blocks. And you need those revenue driving blocks. Because when we think about the major levers in our business, innovation underpins everything. Experimentation, data, R &D, building tools, MVPs and products that we think will fast track our success. But ultimately, we have to be a business that focuses on the audience first, that consumer first. because if you understand their emotional and functional needs, how to reach them in an impactful way, where they are, how to grow them, pulling every lever you can for growth, what actually happens is the impact of your content increases and by design, the revenue increases as well.

19:14So ultimately, at the top, there will always be a revenue portion of the business that we're driving towards, but it does come down to the innovation, experimentation, the foundational blocks and the audience sort of being that largest, largest sort of set of blocks from short form, long form, community, brand building, brand world building, marketing, product, e-com. So like that kind of centralized system is very, very, very much dedicated to the audience. And the content is in service of that.

19:45Ian Shepherd:And you talk about putting the audience first there. When you're working with a creator, how do you decide whether it's a podcast or a book or some other product that you're going to launch with? We begin with the long form. So what's the long form idea? Because ultimately, the foundational belief we have is that if you create incredible content, your distribution opportunity is limitless. Because if you create great long form, your ability to decentralize that distribution and to use short form as not only a tool for marketing and connectivity with your audience, it also can drive revenue and opportunity in the long term.

20:25It does come down to that long form idea to begin with. Does this person have enough expertise, trust, curiosity? Does the audience have enough interest, curiosity, and ability to carve time out to spend time with this creator about this type of conversation? Because we are asking them to find time for us. And I think there was a really interesting statistic that I saw come out of one of the recent podcast reports that about 25 % of audiences who enjoy podcasts only consume the short form content. Now, that's fine. And I love that because it means we've got this massive opportunity to build short form IP out of our long form IP.

21:06I always use the analogy of James Corden on The Late Show. You might not remember him for being on The Late Show, but you certainly remember Carpool Karaoke. And that's a piece of short form IP that has come out of a long form piece of content. is the long form actually has to be really good. Because if you're building audiences outside of that long form and into short form channels, you have to have enough to be working for to make that powerful. And to be honest, the attention, the time you have to get someone's attention is much shorter because you are in a short form environment. So it does start with the long form.

21:36And what we now have is as a way to engage creators into our flywheel and into our ecosystem without necessarily starting with the long form is the biggest investment. It is the most amount of time that we dedicate to building in the business. Because again, it's that belief that long form nuanced human conversation is the thing that inspires progress in human beings. And it can actually help you pursue something more fulfilling yourself. Is that we can sign people to our flight books division, which is our publishing division. Which means that again, we get to understand whether an audience is interested in a topic in depth, which is a book that could then translate into a long form piece of IP.

22:10You can sign to work with us potentially commercially or help us scale your social media, which can lead to rapid monetization and the increase in the value of the IP that you're scaling. You can work with us from a community and events point of view. So we're now sort of having these like smaller, we call it dating, moving in and getting married. So that's how we talk about it in our business. Sometimes you need to date first just to see whether this is something you both enjoy. Then you might take it the next step you move in, which means you deepen the relationship and ultimately you get married, which is kind of that full service of our business.

22:42But there's lots of different ways that we can bring creators on board, but so much of it is data-driven. From the very beginning, we had a uniquely unfair advantage that Steve had had hundreds and hundreds of people on his show and every single episode and every piece of short-form content that had gone out to build the audience around that episode gave us thousands of data points. so we could see. We could see what we thought this person might do ahead of them doing it, which is a gift when you're making investment decisions with creators.

23:13Ian Shepherd:Yeah, yeah. And I love that example of James Corden there. Now, Diary of CEOs, like the second biggest podcast in the world. What specifically have you learned about scaling that that you're applying to the creators that you work with? Kill the guesswork. Experimentation. Rigorous experimentation and commitments to the 1%. The most powerful thing anyone can say in this company, including me, including Stephen, including Christiana, our co-founder, is I don't know. I don't know. So when someone comes in and says, should we test this guest, this format? Should we go and sign this creator to Flight Books?

23:50Should we use this prop? Should we be talking about this in this episode? The answer is, I don't know. The answer is we will experiment and test. so we're running I think we are running upwards of we did a calculation on last year and it was way over a thousand experiments that were run in our business across the course of the year testing everything from the hook in a trailer to the text on a caption to the positioning of a piece of content in the long form Steve built again a sort of pain pain process of you can do all of this rigorous experimentation and testing on a piece of long form content you can edit to a to a point you believe it's it's perfect but ultimately you sort of hit public you then just have to publish it which is a which is definitely an entrepreneurial spirit which is you have to ship the product and you have to get data from the from the audience or your consumer to understand whether that product is going to be fit for market or has product market fit but he was frustrated that that was something that happened after the fact so he has built a tool which we use regularly called Pre-Watch Testing, which is an attention graph of about 5 ,000 to 7 ,000 people who are in a controlled group who watch the episode before it goes live.