🛍️ Podcast Duo Dives into Products We're Obsessed With

Presented by Captivate

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Nick and Jack are the most dynamic business duo in podcasting, after meeting 17 years ago as college roommates. In 2011, while both working in finance, they started a secret side hustle: a daily newsletter called MarketSnacks that made business news more digestible. Their audience grew until they became the go-to millennial voices in finance, with frequent TV appearances and a daily podcast. In 2018, they sold MarketSnacks to Robinhood and continued sharing their daily stories as the Robinhood Snacks Daily podcast. The pair then spun-out the show, relaunching in 2022 as their own podcast The Best One Yet: The 20-minute daily pop-biz news show. After writing, hosting, and producing 1,500 episodes, they identify the surprising origins of the products you’re obsessed with on The Best Idea Yet, co-produced with Wondery.

Nick 

We treated the live shows of The Best One Yet like they were concerts. We ran down the aisles, we’re high-fiving everyone. We both played college sports. Jack was football, I was lacrosse, and we were used to these amp-up moments. It’s like we were taking the field in a way.

On stage, Jack and I record standing up, because we kind of feel like singers, we need our voices to be there. So we had a standing desk on stage. And then once we're on stage, we're facing each other. And this is the fun thing about the chemistry of doing something with your best friend from the last 15 years, we were just locked in on each other. And we were like, “We've got this audience we know loves and supports us. And they're right there.”

Jack 

In our San Francisco show we asked the audience, before our Tesla story, if anyone worked at Tesla. About six people raised their hands and we asked if anyone would volunteer to be the Monday morning quarterback and, after our story, tell us what we got right, what we got wrong. That was really fun because they critiqued one of our facts. They're like, “Actually, you forgot about the Tesla semi-truck.” We're like, you're right.

It's an evolution, but audience engagement is something we really want to keep doing for live shows. And I think we've done enough experiments where we have a repertoire and can pick the right one depending on the size of the audience, the venue, and that kind of thing. 

For the most part, how we chose which cities to visit for the live shows was dictated by size of our audience there, which pretty closely correlates with its population. But we also did it a little bit by convenience. San Francisco is where our West Coast HQ is. So we did a show there because we have a great relationship with the venue. We also have a big audience there. Our next show is in New York City, which is where our biggest audience is. It's also the city that Nick and I started our company in. So a little bit of sentimentality, a little bit of data as well. 

Nick 

If you've never done a live podcast show, you don't want a situation where you didn't sell out. We chose 500-person venues to test the waters. And they sold out in 24 hours. That’s when it really hit us: This special connection we have with our audience is even more special and bigger than we realized.

You've got hundreds of people cheering, saying the catchphrase for a business news show, and they're treating it like a rock concert. That is such a cool experience, feeding off it. The next night, Jack and I were saying, after a live show, we can't sleep. We can see why these rock stars go out crushing a club until two in the morning and party afterward. It's a wild experience. And to consider it all began with business news is an even crazier contrast.

The Best Idea Yet is a show Jack and I have been contemplating for years. We came up with the pitch last year, and seeing it come to fruition is incredible. This whole concept was something we feel is missing in the market, and yet something everyone wants and needs to talk about right now—the idea that there are these products we're obsessed with that have cult followings that have gone viral throughout history, but we don't actually know the stories of where they came from.

Jack and I have pinpointed these stories that have uplifting, positive, exciting cores to them. They're not downfall stories, they're about these products that are the celebrities of our lives. We live in a world where it's not really religion and it's not really companies, it's really these individual products that we tend to worship and treat like celebrities. And yet, we don't know about where they actually came from, like the McDonald's Happy Meal was started by a mom in Guatemala. The Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, the greatest-selling candy of all time, was started by a frog salesman. And along the way, we're weaving in these business insights that you can be entertained by, use something to share at your next party, and you're learning something that's gonna get your next job interview.

Jack 

So we've done six years of our daily podcast, The Best One Yet, and in those six years, we've produced 1,500 episodes, and each episode is three stories. So we've done 4,500, almost 5000 stories. Within those 5,000 stories, we always do research on the company we're covering. And sometimes we're like, this story is incredible. We bookmarked those over the years. Now we have this Rolodex of unbelievable origin stories that overlap with products that are absolutely beloved, and the overlap is what this show is all about.

We're not just doing a full story about Birkenstocks or full story about McDonald's. Other podcasts do deep dives on companies. We're going to the most unbelievable moment where someone had an idea and they took a risk to make it happen. And what is the confluence of factors that went into that being a success?

Nick 

What we've discovered is that while we speak to a certain audience, by doing these deep dives into the products people love, we think we can reach even wider an audience for people who more clearly connect with these products that they're obsessed with, like Super Mario Brothers. And now they hear that Super Mario was designed by a rural, isolated artist living in the woods in Japan, they're going to have even more desire to listen to that show deeply, dive into it, and then become part of the whole TBOY ecosystem.

 (continued below)

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Jack 

There's been a bit of a fetish in the business with the long-form narrative genre for downfall stories. Nick and I have listened to some of those podcast series and watched some of those TV shows, and they're really entertaining. But those have been covered enough, and that's just not our style.

We want a story that will make you feel incredible at the end of it because there are good people with positive intentions who took a big risk, and it paid off to the benefit of all of us who get to consume and love the product.

Nick 

Jack and I call our category pop biz, as in the intersection of pop culture and business. And for us, it's just the extension of who we are. And it's funny, people describe it as family-friendly, and we describe it as brighter.

Nick 

Jack and I care about our intonations, our inflections. We care about studying other great podcasters, understanding how audio connects with people deeply. And so we have huge respect for the audio industry and really want to be authentic and be ourselves with it while also being skilled at it. We’ve found our chemistry and the way we talk to each other lends itself well to a microphone. We sometimes say we're 110% of ourselves. It's a little more amped up, maybe on the show, because you can't see us. So we want you to hear us. For example, we don't just like pizza. We freaking love pizza. And people can connect with 110% a little bit better, but it's still our authentic selves, even if the volume’s turned up a little bit.

Jack 

In pitching The Best Idea Yet, Nick and I took a lesson from the screenplay industry. When you're pitching a movie, the one-sentence logline is really important. We found the logline “The untold origin stories of the products you're obsessed with.” Within the one-sentence description of your show, there needs to be some tension or some kind of irony. And if there isn't, then you need to think of a different way to describe a show.

If you are going to pitch the show and try to find an audience, you're going to have to say it a million times. So make sure you really fall in love with that one-sentence description.

Nick 

Each of these episodes has a third dimension to it: the big screen. We built each of them out so they could really thrive in every medium.

Jack 

We hope listeners feel inspired by each episode’s success story and appreciative of risk-takers in the world who put their all into something. Anybody who launches a product is taking a risk. There's blood, sweat, tears, and money invested, and we want to celebrate those people because they created products we all love using.

🎧 Podcast of the Week: The Best Idea Yet

From the Happy Meal to Levi’s 501 jeans, come for the products you’re obsessed with, stay for the business insights that’ll make you the most interesting person at your next brunch.

The Best Idea Yet hooked me from its opening minutes and is officially one of my favorite new shows. Bonus: It’s family-friendly!

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