Steven Bartlett’s media and investment group FlightStory has made a seven-figure strategic investment in Maggie Sellers Reum’s fast-rising female ambition brand Hot Smart Rich (HSR).
The deal is designed to scale the California-based firm into a transatlantic platform, joining culture, content, capital and community, with the goal of growing both revenue and headcount by 10x across areas such as production, marketing, product, eCommerce and membership.
HSR has built a cult following in less than a year, reaching more than 1.8 million downloads and around 500,000 individual audience members by blending business and money conversations with the kind of intimate, ‘group-chat’ tone its fans share online.
“As you can tell by the name, we just aren’t afraid to go there,” said Sellers Reum.
“I started creating content that felt like you were out to dinner with friends – a place to be vulnerable, learn, laugh, cry and most importantly have fun.”
FlightStory says it will begin work immediately to scale the business using the same blueprint that turned The Diary Of A CEO into one of the world’s biggest creator-led media brands.
The company said its methodology will be deployed to build a deep competitive moat around HSR by scaling lifestyle, taste and business knowledge into a global brand world, rather than simply growing the podcast audience.
The Diary Of A CEO has become FlightStory’s proof point for global scale, with the show now counts around 35m followers, 14m YouTube subscribers and more than 60m monthly listens/views, surpassing a billion streams by 2024.
Bartlett added: “Maggie is a trailblazer who has built an incredible platform and taken a completely fresh approach to the culture of business, entrepreneurship and wealth generation unlike anything I’ve seen before.
“Maggie is not just filling a white space with HSR, she’s disrupting an entire industry.”