How Grace Andrews Turned Diary of a CEO into a Global Phenomenon

0:00I was hired number three and have built and scaled what was a podcast into a multifaceted worldwide brand that is now the second largest show in the world. You know, this isn't Steven Bartlett like it is now. This was Steven Bartlett who hadn't started Dragon's Den. He hadn't written his first book yet. The Diary of a CEO had 8 ,000 YouTube subscribers. I was 24 when I started working with Steve and he put a job post out on LinkedIn. And it wasn't like a formal job post. It was very much a post written out on LinkedIn. I'm hiring. I want a social media manager. He was very early to this concept of personal branding.

0:41I actually don't think it was even a term at that point. It was kind of brand building or personal social media. And the reason I was able to get in front of him above the thousands of applications, I was already building a portfolio through the social climber. And it was what I consider my my digital evidence, my digital CV that meant I could send a link and go, look, here's what I do. Do you like it? If you like it, let's work together. So I didn't have to do much convincing. I didn't have to write a cover letter. I didn't have to share my CV. So I had evidence that I knew what I was talking about and I could back up back myself in that process.

1:21So I connected with Steve over LinkedIn. Two weeks later, I was in the office. We didn't know what was right and what was wrong. We knew that if we wanted, you know, if we think about instinctual behaviors, like we knew we wanted people to consume this thing. if you want people to consume a movie you produce a trailer so that was kind of how we went in and I think naivety is a superpower but that's a separate topic um we you know we were a group of three of us who'd never produced a podcast before but ultimately I think we doubled down on content we sweat every detail to the point where most people would think we're like completely insane from the scent when you walk in to the music that's playing to the batting pass that happens everyone knowing exactly what role they're doing and how they contribute to this this piece of work at the end and having that responsibility on their shoulders we've always seen it as a show and having that video and that element of uh visual means you can show up on different platforms that do enable discoverability so it's a funny one because we've never called the diary of a podcast because we've always seen it as a video first format and there was this like phase where people call them vodcasts and all of these things but we've just been like we're a show we see this thing going on netflix one day so we're always going to treat it like that um it's how we were able to get onto airlines before anyone else it's how we were able to go into bbci player and all these different distribution platforms um and i think it i do think it all comes back down to that that mindset of we're going to do this our way and not the blueprinted way so we were like if we care more than anyone else we're probably gonna be all right I think he really values that I'm willing to tell him when I disagree with him uh sometimes it's you know back and forth and we're butting heads a little bit but we get to a really like beautiful conclusion because we've had like creative and data-led disagreement I guess that brings us to a really nice place I will find a solution like I'm a very solution-driven person so we're gonna figure out how to do this extraordinary influencer campaign next week with no budget um and we're going to get 90 of the influencers to open that like that's a real life scenario like i could list and list and list the scenarios i did also take a risk it's funny because now everyone you know i will dream to work with stephen bartlett it's amazing and don't get wrong everything we've created together has been incredible and it's been the best fast-tracking learning journey of my entire of life probably we've really like mastered this blueprint of how to get people to buy into our brand and the reality is all of the work happened about a year before we released that product it was the investment into really adding genuine value to these people so we didn't follow a rule book or a playbook we based a lot of our development of that marketing funnel in first principles like the first principles of human behavior how do you get someone to watch something I think that's what's allowed us to be so successful is because we didn't have podcast expertise in the team.

4:32So we were never like walled in or narrowed down to what success could look like.