Maggie Sellers Reum’s 'Hot Smart Rich’ will join Steven Bartlett’s FlightStory

FlightStory, the global media and investment company co-founded by Steven Bartlett, entrepreneur and host of the world’s second-biggest host-led podcast, The Diary Of A CEO along with Georgie Holt FlightStory co-founder & CEO & Christiana Brenton FlightStory co-founder and CRO today announced a landmark strategic 7-figure investment in Maggie Sellers Reum, the cult-followed entrepreneur, investor and podcaster behind the new powerhouse media brand, Hot Smart Rich (HSR).

The partnership is an intentional move to build the biggest female ambition brand of the next decade by scaling a platform dedicated to women at the intersection of culture, content, capital and community. The investment will focus on building the media brand’s impact and reach in the US and aligned global markets, developing the HSR infrastructure and growing the revenue profile of the business by 10x and team by the same multiple across; content production, brand and marketing, commercial, experimentation, product, ecomm and community.

Hot Smart Rich

HSR is an unapologetically bold media and investing platform that takes on the male-dominated world of business and entrepreneurship, especially in podcasting, reaching over 1.8M total downloads and reaching 500,000 individual audience members in less than its first year.

A recent study found that only 7% of business and entrepreneurship podcasts are hosted by women but Maggie and HSR have already dominated the charts by creating a space to explore modern female ownership through the conversations and themes of money, business, power, and relationships that women need to build the lives they deserve, but are too often afraid to talk about, delivered with the same intimate, group-chat energy that makes HSR fans feel like they’re right there in the room.

HSR combines the acumen of business podcasts like How I Built This with the magnetic personality and cultural resonance of Call Her Daddy. Maggie says she’s building a show that is very much the “‘Unwell for well girls” with content that leaves her audience hotter, smarter, richer but most importantly, informed by someone they want to hear these insights from.

“As you can tell by the name, we just aren’t afraid to go there.” She adds, “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. It’s exhausting for women out there. We constantly have to choose who to bring to the table to feel like we deserve a seat. I started creating content to build my own table when I realized I no longer had to choose what part of me to bring because that was inherently the special sauce of being a female in business. With my content and our investing platform, we’re trying to solve the tension between women driving the economy, yet having disproportionately lower levels of ownership by encouraging them to bring their whole, authentic self to whatever situation they’re in even if they haven’t founded a company to the level of Spanx, Canva or Bumble yet. We encourage angels to start taking ownership today.”

Her highly-engaged global community (Maggie currently has a 8.10% engagement rate compared to the industry standard of 2.4%), who are known as the HSR Angels, spans LA, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, and Paris, and acts as a global network that supports women in creating and building personal and generational wealth by betting on themselves. Most angels are between 20-45 and heavily skew as interested in business with 31% self-reporting as an active entrepreneur and 21% identifying as an aspiring entrepreneur.

Maggie’s cultural currency, built through her honest, subversive and high-integrity content, is amplified by her high-profile listeners and readers like Susan Yara who recently exited Natiurium to e.l.f for $355M or venture capitalists like Megan Lightcap from Slow Ventures, all the way to celebrity personalities like Queer Eye’s star, Jonathan Van Ness, who recently appeared on the show to give an exclusive on what really happened to his haircare brand, JVN Hair after declaring bankruptcy. Founders say they often see an influx of interest from potential financial and strategic buyers after appearing on the show.

This investment aligns strategically with FlightStory’s core mission of scaling creator-led brands that help people pursue more fulfilling lives. FlightStory, whose vision is building the future of media for the creator age, will employ the blueprint into Hot Smart Rich that scaled The Diary Of A CEO into the second biggest podcast globally and one of today’s most successful media brands. Enabling FlightStory’s ongoing ambition to turn creator content into companies by scaling valuable human IP.

Steven Bartlett and FlightStory’s commitment to new voices is a driving force behind the partnership. “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”, said Steven Bartlett. “I was shocked to hear as little as 7% of business podcasts are fronted by women, and yet it is estimated that women control a huge proportion of consumer spend in the US”, he added. “Maggie is not just filling a white space with HSR, she’s disrupting an entire industry.”

Maggie adds, “This partnership is more than an investment in me, it’s an investment by Steven and his team into the future of women taking control of their businesses and lives. Steven Bartlett has built something truly game-changing with The Diary of a CEO and to know we are about to apply the same methodology to Hot Smart Rich that scaled that blueprint into the second-biggest host-led podcast, matches the ambition I have always held for HSR. Every hard-working woman has the right to be Hot, Smart and Rich, and with this investment, we’re that much closer to achieving it.”