How I Made $10 Million from The Diary of a CEO

Everyone would like to be on Diary of a CEO. In fact, I would have paid $6 million to sponsor the show if I could have and be on there just once. Fast forward to today, I've been selected to be on the show six times, making me the most repeated guest to come back onto the show. Now, I wanna share with you behind the scenes, how does Diary of a CEO work? How do they select their guests? And how do you make it work from a business angle? You'll be able to apply this whether you wanna end up on the biggest podcasts in the world, or whether you just simply wanna use podcasting as a strategy to grow your business. Either way, let's get started and I'll talk you through it. So first of all, let me take you behind the scenes and tell you how I ended up on the show for the very first time. Now, it actually, the story starts a month earlier. I'm skiing in Switzerland and I get a message on my phone from Stephen Bartlett's account. And it says, Daniel, I've seen you on YouTube and I'd love to have you on the show. Would you like to come onto the show? And I thought it was a scam. And I thought to myself, this is definitely not real. So I just ignored it and I put my phone away and I kept skiing. And then at lunchtime, I had a closer look and I realized that this is his real account. This has got millions and millions of followers. I showed my wife and she said, it's probably real. Why don't you message back? So I said, sure, I'd love to go on the show. And he came back and he said, we can film either Monday or in three months time. So I thought, you know what? I'm gonna just fly back and do the show at short notice. So Monday morning comes around. They pick me up in the Diary of a CEO mobile. It's a really cool van that they pick up their guests. I arrive at the studio. I bump into Stephen in the elevator. Obviously, I'm feeling a bit nervous. I keep my cool. We go on up. Within a few minutes, we're sitting down at the table and he's saying, Daniel, tell us a little bit about yourself. Fortunately, I was super ready for the experience. I had my pitch ready. I had my content already mapped out in my mind and I was ready for the experience. Over the following few months, over 3 million people watched the episode. I got speaking engagements from all over the world. We had 9,000 people sign up for a free account with Score App. We had $3 million worth of new business coming at Dent. My other new businesses started just lighting up. I attracted some new talented team members who discovered me through Diary of a CEO and my publisher contacted me and said, we've sold 50,000 copies of your book more than we expected to. So you could say in every single way, it was a life-changing experience. Now, what does it feel like to be sitting there at the table? It feels a little bit nerve-wracking. It feels a little bit tense, but I tell you what, I was ready for the experience and I wanna share with you three things that I had that made me ready for the whole experience. Okay, so when you go on any podcast, whether it's Diary of a CEO or any of the other podcasts that are out there, the first 30 seconds really matters. You have to hook your audience and that first hook pitch is super, super, super important. So we're gonna talk about how do you do a hook pitch, the opening 30 seconds, what do you have to get across so that people really wanna hear from you some more? So we call this framework, name, same, claim to fame, pain, aim, and a game, right? A few things, but you can get it all in under 40 seconds. So first one is what is your name and what is your business name, right? So I'm Daniel Priestley, I'm the co-founder of ScoreApp or I'm the founder of Dent Global, right? So what is your name, what is your business name? So that's the first thing that we need to do. Same, what do people already understand that they already recognise that you're very similar to? So you might say, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm an author, I'm a speaker. You might say, I'm a life coach, I'm a business coach. You might say, I run an agency, I have a software business, right, you wanna keep it nice and simple. So that's name, same. You can see here that the energy drops and then it starts to pick up as we go. The next one is fame. So what is your claim to fame? What have you done that's special? You could say, I've written some books, you could say, I've spoken on some stages, I've won some awards, I've worked with these famous brands that you've heard of, right, anything at all that makes you stand out as being a little bit interesting and different. So your name, then same, then fame. Now, you may wanna talk about what's called pain. So you can say, a lot of people struggle with X or all over the world people are finding it very difficult to achieve X, Y and Z or there's this issue that many people are struggling with. So that's where you outline the fact that there's a pain and presumably you're gonna talk about how to solve that. And then from pain, you go aim, which is, what are you aiming for short term? And it's often that you're resolving this particular pain that exists. And then finally, game. And the big game is, what is the big picture behind what you wanna do? Like, what is the bigger vision for who you are and what you wanna achieve? Now, when you sit down with Stephen Barlett and he says, tell me a bit about yourself, you wanna be ready where you can say, I'm Daniel Priestley. I'm the founder of several different businesses. My background is as an entrepreneur and I'm also known as an author. I've worked with over 5,000 businesses. I've built and sold multiple companies, fame. Entrepreneurship is a very difficult journey. Many people struggle with entrepreneurship. A lot of businesses fail. My aim is to help entrepreneurs to stand out, scale up and make a positive impact through business. And my bigger game is to solve the world's most meaningful problems by getting entrepreneurs who make a dent in the universe. Now, if I cover all of that in about 30 seconds, which I just did, I've just gone through that framework of name, same, fame, pain, aim, gain. It's a lot, but it actually gives you a really good hook. There's so much there for your podcast host to latch onto and run with. So that's the first thing you need. You need to be able to hook your listeners in the first 30 seconds when you go on a podcast. Okay, so the next thing that we need is called a product ecosystem. So a product ecosystem is your products and services that people can follow up with if they enjoy your episode. Now, if you don't have this, it's almost pointless being on the show in the first place. Imagine the desert and it comes in with a big rain cloud and it rains in the desert and then it just immediately evaporates. That's what it would be like if you went on Diary of a CEO, but you didn't have any product and services for people to buy or anything for people to engage with. They're going to essentially be excited by what you have to say and then there's nowhere for that to go. So there's no point. They're going to forget you a week from now. They're going to be listening to the next podcast after that. So you have to have somewhere for people to go after they've watched the podcast. So this is part of before the game is after the game. So what is a product ecosystem? You might've heard me talk about this before. There are four products and services. There's a gift, which is something people can get straight away for free. There's a product for prospects, which is free, but you have to register for it. There's a core offering, which is a transformational thing that people can buy. And then there's a product for clients, which is something that people can subscribe to. So let me talk you through my product ecosystem that I had that was ready to go after I'd been on Diary of a CEO. So gifts. The first thing that I had was I had lots of free stuff online. So people could go to my YouTube channel with long videos explaining how entrepreneurship works. I already had some of those ready to go. I also had online scorecards. So people could go and take the key person of influence assessment. They could take the 24 assets assessment. In fact, we saw hundreds of people taking those after I was on Diary of a CEO. The next thing is we had downloadable PDF reports, and we had lots of people who were just downloading our PDF reports that were sitting there on the website. So these were all things that people could easily, quickly access super fast without spending any money. The next thing we had were product for prospects. These are things people have to register for. And what I did is I had a series of webinars that people could register for, and these were 90-minute webinars after Diary of a CEO where people could get on the webinar. I also had an online discussion group where people could join the discussion group, and about 8,000 people joined the Facebook discussion group that I had ready to go. Also, we had more extensive scorecards and assessments. So we had these ones which were just quick and easy ones, answer 15 questions. These ones were more extensive. These were 48 questions each. And also, we had some live events. So if people were based in certain cities, they could turn up and see me live. So those were all there, and they were ready to go. As a core offering, we had dent accelerators. So people could sign up and do the startup accelerator, or they could do the key person of influence accelerator. Oh, by the way, I should have mentioned product for prospects, books. So I had lots of people buying my books. We had dent accelerators. On top of dent accelerators, we have August Recognition, which is an agency that I've got which helps people to win awards. We had Rethink Press, which is a publishing company that I own. And then the product for clients is all subscription revenue products. So for subscription revenue, I've got Score App, where we have on average, we have at the moment about 8,500 businesses that pay about $50 a month for their Score App subscription. So we had lots of people being able to sign up for a Score App account. We have Book Magic, which is an AI tool that allows people to write their book and helps guide them through the process of writing a book. So because I had this product and service ecosystem ready to go, as soon as that Diary of a CEO episode aired and 3 million people watched it, very rapidly, a significant portion of them started downloading the free gifts, engaging with the product for prospects, buying from the core offering or subscribing for the product for clients. And straightaway, we had millions of new revenue that just started flowing through our product ecosystem. All told, over the last couple of years, we've had probably $5 million that have just come in directly through different podcasts from Diary of a CEO. Okay, so you've got your hook pitch, you've got your product ecosystem, now you wanna go on Diary of a CEO. Unfortunately, you can't go straight to Diary of a CEO. It doesn't work that way. That is just not how they discover people. The team at Diary of a CEO, they don't go looking for people who want to be on Diary of a CEO. They get hundreds of inquiries a day. They go looking for people who have been good performers on other podcasts. So I wanna introduce you to something called the podcast pyramid. So what is the podcast pyramid? Well, it turns out that there is a big pyramid scheme called podcasting. And basically, it works like this. There's something like 600,000 podcasts that are out there, and about 100,000 of them have got more than three episodes, right? So call it 100,000 serious podcasts that are active. Now, here's how it works. In every category, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of podcasts that get between 100 and 1,000 views per episode. So they're very small podcasts, right? They're the bottom of the pyramid. In fact, some of them probably only get 10 views, right? Now, believe it or not, I have done dozens and dozens and dozens of episodes where I've got between 100 and 1,000 views, right? So going back years and years, if you go looking deeply on YouTube, you'll find me on all sorts of little podcasts that have 100 to 1,000 views. So there's so many of these. Next level up, obviously, we've got 1,000 to 5,000 views. That's a different category of podcast. We've got 5,000 to 25,000. We've got 25,000 to 100,000. Then we've got 100,000 plus. And then right at the tippy top here, we've got 1,000,000 views plus. So there's actually only a dozen podcasts that consistently get over a million views, like Dire Ever CEO and Joe Rogan, right? So this is the absolute tippy-toppy of the pyramid here. So here's how it works. When you start out, you deliberately wanna go for the small podcasts. You wanna go for 100 to 1,000 typical views, or maybe even 1,000 to 5,000 typical views, and you wanna just start down here. And the reason you wanna do this is you wanna build your skills as a podcast guest. You wanna make sure that you're comfortable with the whole podcast setup. You wanna have your stories. You wanna have your jokes. You wanna have your first 30-second hook pitch ready to go. You wanna know what are the typical questions that people ask and what are your best answers to those. Like in the world of sport, you start out at the junior levels and you work your way up to the more senior levels. You don't go to the Olympics on your first day. So you wanna basically test out your skills at this junior level. Now, the key is that when you go onto one of these podcasts, or more importantly, when you go onto 10 of these podcasts, you also wanna get good at promoting these podcasts so that they are outperforming their typical audience. Now, here's the trick. If you go onto the base of the podcast here, 100 to 1,000 views, your job is to get 1,000-plus views for that podcast. Your job is to promote it to your email list, potentially even run some ads to it to make sure that it is an outperforming podcast so that whoever's down here says, ooh, that was one of my best episodes. Now, when you go up here, your job, if you're on one of these podcasts, is to make sure your podcast episode gets more than 5,000 views so that the person who's here who typically gets 1,000 to 5,000 views says, aha, this person was one of my top-performing podcasts. So what you're trying to do is promote it to your email list, make sure it's all over your socials, make sure that you DM some people and ask them to check it out and watch it, make sure that you and your team all watch it and that you go through and actually increase the watch time for this particular episode. So you're trying to get interested viewers to go and see it. The mistake that most people make is if they go onto somebody else's podcast, they say, oh, I've done my bit, I answered my questions, it's over to you to promote that episode, but it's not. It should be on you to promote the episode. You're trying to create an outperforming podcast episode. So now you start working your way up. Now you've done 30, 40, 50 podcast episodes, you're now in the 5,000 to 25,000 band, now you're trying to make sure that that episode gets more than 25,000 and this episode gets more than 100,000. So if you were to do a deep dive into me on social media, on YouTube, you would see me on more than 100 podcast episodes and you'd see all the little ones several years ago climbing slowly up to the bigger ones and then there is a few breakout moments. So a couple of my breakout moments, I was on a podcast called Chris Do and that was called The Future. And Chris had me on there and he typically gets 50,000 to 100,000 and I was able to get over 100,000 on Chris's podcast. It's actually grown a bit now, it's even more than that now. Then I was on Ali Abdaal and that was a real breakout moment because Ali's podcasts normally get hundreds of thousands of views and I got a couple of million and he invited me to go back onto the show a second time and I got a couple of million again. So I was his top performing guest. Now guess how Diary of a CEO noticed me and guess how I got onto the show. It turns out that the guest booking agent at Diary of a CEO, they had been looking at Ali Abdaal's podcast and they noticed that the top one and two position was this guest that they'd never heard of called Daniel Priestley. And they said, oh my goodness, Ali's most high performing guest is Daniel Priestley with 2.9 million. His next performing guest is Daniel Priestley with 1.9 million. And all the other guests are typically in the early millions or high hundred thousands. So strangely, this person they'd never heard of occupied position number one and position number two on that other podcast. When they saw that, they reached out to me and said, would you like to be on Diary of a CEO? Because they'd seen that I'd been a high performing guest on this other podcast. So that's how the game works. They're not looking necessarily for people who have written a book. They're not necessarily looking for people who are eloquent. They're certainly not looking for people who have a strong desire to be on the show. That doesn't make you special. They're looking for people who have performed at lower levels of the podcast pyramid. Your job is to not try and skip the steps. Your job is to start at the base and just climb the ladder, climb the ladder, climb the ladder, be a little bit patient, like a sports star, like an athlete. Win this game of tennis, now move on to the next game of tennis. Win this game of tennis, eventually you find yourself up at Centre Court, Wimbledon, where you're playing at the highest level. And it's the same with podcasting as well. So the three things that you need if you wanna be successful as a podcast guest is a hook for the first 30 seconds to a minute to hook the person's attention. You need an ascending transaction model, a product ecosystem here, so that you can monetize your podcast experiences. And you need the patience to climb the podcast pyramid so that you can start at the bottom and get all the way to the top. So then, once I was on Dire Over CEO, my episode got over three million views, which was an outperforming episode. They invited me back again. It got another three million views. And every single time I've been on Dire Over CEO since, I've always had more than three million views. So I'm a top performing guest, which means that I keep getting invited back. And other than that, I'm pretty easy to work with as well. Okay, this is a smaller piece of a bigger puzzle. And the next thing I want you to know is that there is a step-by-step process for going from zero to a million of revenue predictably. In fact, I created another video, which is about an hour long, and I go step-by-step-by-step, starting out with no skills and no investment, ending up as a key person of influence with a team of 10 people and a seven-figure revenue. And I break it down into five clear steps. It's a big video because it covers a lot. I would love for you to get your notepad, get your pen, and watch that video next. If you've enjoyed this video, please give it a like, give it a subscribe. I hope your business is doing well, and I look forward to seeing you soon.