Every weekday, former Wall Streeters and current best friends Nick Martell and Jack Crivici-Kramer set out to make “The Best One Yet” (“TBOY”): The 20-minute daily pop-biz podcast is designed to make their audience feel brighter every morning. Their goal is to engage, entertain and educate their devoted listeners with compelling coverage of business news that fuses pop culture, current events, and clever takeaways. They call this new category “Pop Biz” — and the result is over 40M annual downloads for two years straight and more than 900 episodes recorded so far.
In each episode, co-hosts Nick and Jack curate a unique mix of 3 stories about business, economics, and financial news. Then they craft creative narratives to make complex stories digestible, with relevant metaphors, unique storylines, and engaging hot takes. Finally, they bring MBA-level insights about how business works and share the secrets they learned on Wall Street. Their host-driven chemistry leaves the audience with actionable insights as consumers, professionals, and/or investors.
The hosts open the show with bright, buzzy commentary on pop culture news and finish with an audience-submitted “Best Fact Yet.” As a bonus, the show closes with user-submitted “shoutouts” for birthdays, weddings, and other celebrations. These business-adjacent, light hearted bookends strategically ensure the audience feels bright to start their day.
The connection with the audience is so deep that listeners have even asked the hosts to help them propose to a girlfriend through the show — what other business podcast has experienced that live on-air?
More than 900 episodes later, the story of TBOY is a journey from side hustle to full hustle, acquisition to spinoff. It began in 2012 as a business newsletter called “MarketSnacks”, which Nick and Jack started in secret while working at banks in NYC. MarketSnacks evolved from a side hustle passion project to a revenue-generating newsletter to a full-blown media company with 2 daily products. Live TV appearances, Forbes “30 Under 30,” and audience growth followed. During business school, Nick and Jack launched their daily podcast, “Snacks Daily,” which changed everything: they found their calling as podcasters, who spend 20 minutes per day pouring all their knowledge, personality, and insights into a show that makes audiences feel bright every day.
In 2018, stock trading app Robinhood acquired MarketSnacks as its first-ever acquisition, rebranding the newsletter and podcast as “Robinhood Snacks.” Nick and Jack ran the Snacks media arm of Robinhood for three years, building the largest email newsletter in the US, while the podcast grew to one of the largest daily news podcasts with more than 40M downloads in 2021.
After Robinhood’s IPO, Nick and Jack spun-off the podcast into a brand new, full-owned company rebranded as: The Best One Yet (aka “TBOY” — the catchphrase said at the top of every show).
As an independent show, the TBOY co-hosts have continued to grow their audiences and refine their unique approach to daily business storytelling. Each episode includes Nick and Jack’s thought-provoking, insightful and informed takeaways that resonate with their audience of ambitious “Yetis,” which consists of investors, consumers, entrepreneurs, and young professionals.
The evolution of TBOY has not been without challenges. For example, during the meme stock era of 2020 and 2021, their audience was bombarded with get-rich-quick stock market stories on SPACs and crypto across social media. While competing shows joined the hype for attention, Nick and Jack maintained their integrity by resisting that narrative of unbridled enthusiasm. Instead, they harnessed their Wall Street background and MBA expertise to focus on the realities of downturns, losses, and bubbles. While they chose not to give explicit investment advice, they do share their personal investing stories of both successes and failures so that listeners can learn from their experiences.
For Nick and Jack, podcasting is truly a full-time job — especially for a daily show. They are among the few podcast hosts who handle the full operation, from daily heavy research toscript-drafting, fact-checking, and post-production editing. They found strategic efficiencies to make daily production possible. For example, their “One & Done” rule eliminates the thrash and delay of content creation — When one edits the other’s work, they do not debate the changes, but simply trust each other to make the final change.
For Nick and Jack, podcasting on the mics together is the only job they want for the next 40 years.
The top-line metric of success for podcasts is downloads, as that measures how many people we have an impact on. TBOY shows were downloaded more than 50 million times in 2022, up 8% from 2021 — significant growth in a crowded year for podcasts overall and a down year for news consumption generally.
Spinning off from Robinhood and rebranding as “TBOY” was no easy feat, but Nick and Jack know what it takes to deliver a great show for an audience, and that audience has remained loyal while continuing to grow. With more than 900 episodes under their belt, their listeners don’t just download, they are engaged throughout, with the average listener making it through 90% of each episode. In total, With 50% of listeners considering TBOY as their main source of daily news, it’s clear that the combination of MBA-level analysis with Nick and Jack’s personalities and energy is attracting a daily, mainstream audience at scale.
It’s not just one of the most-listened to daily shows in podcasting, in 2022 it was also the #1 most-listened to pod of the year for 32K Spotify listeners, a top 5 podcast for 83K Spotify listeners and in the top ten for 108K Spotify listeners.
Nick and Jack also read every review they get on Apple, even the bad ones. They’re proud of their podcast ratings, which are qualitative reinforcement of what the numbers show. Apple podcast rating: 4.6 stars (9,033 ratings). Spotify rating: 4.9 stars (7,100 ratings).
