Nick Martell & Jack Kramer have launched the pop-biz pod you all love

Meet Nick Martell and Jack Kramer, the masterminds and hosts behind the new daily pop-biz news show The Best One Yet (On Spotify, Apple, or anywhere else you get your pods), making today’s top stories your business. 15 minutes on the 3 biz stories you need - with fresh takes you can pretend you came up with - pairs perfectly with your morning oatmeal ritual. They spoke with the Shack Journal about their new podcast, their experience running the news arm at Robinhood, called Robinhood Snacks, and their mutual love of Seinfeld.

SHACK15: Can you tell us about your experience at Robinhood and what led you to branch off and create your own podcast?

Martell & Kramer: It actually started pre Robinhood. Jack, my co-founder, and I were college roommates and we started a company that we grew from a side hustle to a full hustle over the years and that company was MarketSnacks that makes business news digestible. We sold it to Robinhood three years ago and that's what brought us from the East Coast to the West Coast. We’d been at Robinhood the last three years riding this crazy rocket ship that started with 300 people and then it was 3,000 people post-IPO, when we realized the timing was right to leave. MarketSnacks is digestible business news that was part of this fintech stock trading app - the idea being we were this editorially independent news arm. And so Jack and I were running that news arm which was called Robinhood Snacks, making business news fun, clear, and entertaining. And over time as we built up the podcast audience Jack and I realized the audience was really connected with us and that there was this unique connection in podcasting that you don't get in newsletters, which is people feel connected to the personalities behind it. So we worked out a deal with Robinhood after three years where we said, you know what, we want to get back to our entrepreneurial roots, and we are fortunate that we were able to spin off the podcast into this new company that Jack and I just started running two weeks ago which is a podcast-first company called The Best One Yet - TBOY for short - where the core product is the audio, the daily business news podcast, making business news fun and entertaining, and then video and more spin-offs coming along with that.

Jack and I met 15 years ago - we walked into the same dorm room at Middlebury College. Jack had Seinfeld DVDs, I had Seinfeld DVDs, and we immediately hit it off. And naturally, we were best friends and lived together every year in college and then eventually when we were working at banks in New York, we started doing this side hustle where we started making, you know, a daily newsletter what was happening in the markets but covering companies that we actually cared about, and we grew that side hustle into a full hustle. So I've known Jack for over a decade and we've managed to balance friendship and co-CEO-ship and co-founder-ship and going through an acquisition and a spin-off so we’ve kind of seen it all.

SHACK15: So what's behind the name of this podcast The Best One Yet?

Martell & Kramer: We decided that every time we do a podcast, every single day, we put so much research into it and we realized that today’s pod was always better than yesterday’s pod, and then we kept doing it every day and we started saying, you know what, this pod is the best one yet, and over time, it just became this habit that our listeners really connect with. Each day was the best one yet or each thing we created was the best version of that. And we start saying TBOY for short, this is the best one yet. Today’s pod is better than the previous pod, so it just kind of took on a theme of its own and it became a mindset that our listeners really connected with. So when Jack and I had created MarketSnacks the idea was to make business news into a snack - something you eat - and when we spun off this podcast years later our thought was we could name it in a way that describes the product literally, or we can name our new company after the feeling it gives you when you finished listening to it. And we thought that was something really exciting so we said you know what, we’re going to literally name the podcast The Best One Yet.

SHACK15: I notice there is quite a lot of variety in terms of the subject matter that you choose to talk about. How do you go about this research and what do you think of this new Tropicana cereal that goes with orange juice? Have you tried it? 

Martell & Kramer: Jack did try it today and it tasted decent [laughing]. But when it comes to your first question, Jack always says content is king, but curation is queen - and this idea that great content is always the cornerstone of all media products. But if you can curate it in a world in which there is so much content, that's a huge value add too. So what we try to do every day is curate in addition to providing great content. We want to find just the three stories that we think are the most important, the most relevant, the most funny, entertaining, and interesting, but we also want to find the right mix. So that includes covering tech companies to food and beverage companies to fashion companies.  We want to curate the stories that you haven't heard about. So for example, we just did a story on Madison Reed, the hair color company hitting almost a billion dollar valuation. You're not going to see that on the front page of the Wall Street Journal but we think there's a takeaway in there that's super relevant, around raising capital, but it's within a company whose news you maybe haven’t heard. But we're also going to pair that with news we just did today about Bed Bath & Beyond, that's trying to stay relevant by creating a holiday around college students getting accepted to college. And we’re going to pair that with a story we did today on Domino's Pizza whose takeout sales are crushing it because they're running out of drivers for delivery. We are also transforming complicated economy stories that wouldn’t feel relatable into something that is, like the Fed’s interest rate hikes being a form of “tough love.” So what we're trying to find every day in the variety of stories you see is a mix of stories you wouldn't see anywhere else, even that story on Tropicana and its orange juice cereal. 

SHACK15: So what's the response been so far to the podcast? I know you just launched a couple of weeks ago but what have listeners been saying? Has listenership been growing? 

Martell & Kramer: Listenership has definitely been growing. The enthusiasm has absolutely been there. What we’ve seen is that even though the topic is business news, we’ve seen excitement and support and this embrace of The Best One Yet, as like a mindset. What we’ve also seen, funnily, is that change can be hard for people. So we have this rap jingle that introduces the pod that we commissioned from a couple of rappers in Texas who were fans of the podcast. We also had a jingle in our previous podcast which was called Snacks Daily, so I think some people are getting used to the new jingle and they don't like the idea of having to memorize new words, so that's been one of those funny things where it's like, change is just different for people and can be a little hard. So that's the feedback we've gotten, but in general it's been massively enthusiastic I would say, and people kind of have this “let's go” mindset where they can't wait to see what we're going to launch next. So previously Jack and I were just running the podcast and newsletter at Robinhood, and now with The Best One Yet, it's a podcast, and we just launched a video version of the podcast. We’re going to be doing a live video, we're going to be doing merch - there’s just so much more we can do now and I think there's an untapped excitement for that. 

SHACK15: My last question is about your long-term goals, which we touched on a bit, but where do you see yourself going with The Best One Yet?

Martell & Kramer: What Jack and I are looking towards is three things. One is entrepreneurial independence, the idea that we can take really cool risks where we don’t know what the return is going to be. Two is the fans. At the end of the day we’re just doing this for the fans. In fact I’d say the fans are number one. We have this audience that connects with business news in a way that we’ve never seen an audience connect with business news - and it’s because it doesn't feel like business news. It feels like you're having a fun time with your best friends every single weekday in a 15-minute sit-down hangout. And so the more we can be doing with the fans, interacting with live shows, interacting with live audio, doing video, answering comments and questions freely throughout the day - these are the things that excite us. All the things we haven’t been able to do before and that we didn't do before we can now do, and we know the fans want it - so getting to do more with the fans and interacting with the fans. 

The third thing that Jack and I are most excited about is that it’s really a challenge to run a company with your best friend - but Jack and I make it work and we really enjoy working together. And we’re just really excited by the unknown.

Learn more about The Best One Yet by listening and subscribing here.