The Acquired podcast is number 1 in the charts

It's not every day that a podcast hosted on Transistor reaches #1 on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

As a small team, the Acquired podcast has climbed ahead of large media brands like The Daily, Dateline, Joe Rogan, Crime Junkie, Smartless, and NPR.

​Acquired is a business podcast that delves into the histories of great companies like Microsoft, Costco, and Nike. They'll spend hundreds of hours researching and crafting a compelling narrative for each episode.

Their recent spike in traffic has been mainly due to an excellent profile they received in the Wall Street Journal.

The show is produced by a team of three: co-hosts David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert and their editor. I recently interviewed David about building an audience and how they were able to attract large sponsors like JP Morgan.

When I asked them why they switched their podcast hosting to Transistor, David replied:

We evaluated every podcast hosting provider out there, including many of the big ones. Transistor was just in this incredible sweet spot for us: you have great technology, you were willing to work with us, and you had built a lot of the analytics and data we needed for our business. So it's been perfect. We're so happy with you guys.

Small, independent podcasts can attract a big audience

Having Acquired hit #1 on the Apple Podcasts charts proves that small boutique podcasts can compete against well-funded incumbents like the New York Times and NBC, as well as celebrity-driven podcasts like Smartless, Conan O’Brien, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

David says:

The future of the podcast industry isn't the mass-produced, network-driven shows. Instead, it's the independent, boutique, bootstrapped shows.  The beautiful parts of the podcast medium is the relationship between the hosts and the listeners.

"Transistor is the perfect platform for those kinds of shows," David mentions.