The Hamster Wheel That Eats Creators

A few weeks ago I was at a breakfast meetup at Table Cafe in London. Full English. This was both a new term of food art for me and meant that I tried the black pudding for the first time. So a number of big emotional accomplishments in one meal. I also had tea. It was lovely.

I am now obviously an incredibly seasoned international traveler who doesn't resort to cheap travel-based jokes in a newsletter to garner communal acknowledgement.

However, the breakfast wasn't the reason I was there. I'd wanted to catch up with two podcasters whom I'd become friendly with. I'd been a fan of both pods for a while - good buzz, engaged audience, a community layer that punched above the show's apparent size. And, with my consultant hat on, I also thought this signaled both could be bigger.

What I didn't expect was that within the next half hour, both of them, separately, would name the same problem.

"I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel I can't get off of."

They make weekly content and they love making it. Their audience shows up, often and happily (although ironically managing that is also a huge time suck in itself). So by the time they finish everything, it's time to start the next episode. There's no time for the strategic questions, even though they both knew the strategic questions were the ones they actually needed to answer.

That conversation became the start of two engagements. It also became the thing I haven't stopped thinking about since.

Most "how to grow your podcast" advice treats the operator's time as if it were limitless. The reality, as anyone will tell you, is very far from that.

The Show Eats The Operator

I was struck by something specific in how those creators described their week. The work itself wasn't what weighed on them. They both genuinely loved making the show. What weighed on them was the structure of it - production, posting, community engagement, prep, repeat - which left no space for a strategic conversation to live, let alone get acted on.

That isn't a discipline issue. A weekly show with a real community is, structurally, a full-time job. Add the platform-specific obligations that have crept in over the last two years - the YouTube cut, the social shorts, the newsletter the audience now expects, the appearances on other people's pods - and it's more than a full-time job. The operator is fully consumed by the exact things that made them visible.

(podcasters love irony but they do not love 100+ hour work weeks)

And here's where it gets them - every conversation about scaling that show into a bigger business assumes the operator will find time to think about it but they won't. They're too busy writing the script, editing, selling ads, etc.

This is why most of the standard creator advice (expand into video, launch a second show, build a Patreon, do live) almost never gets executed. Time, or the distinct lack thereof, kills it all.

That's the question that actually matters when you hit a certain audience threshold. How do you actually grow this and remain sane?

What Audiochuck Built Between The Episodes

I've been thinking about Audiochuck a lot since that breakfast.

Ashley Flowers built Crime Junkie, which became one of the most listened-to podcasts in the country. She also built Audiochuck the company, which is structurally a different thing from a podcast that happens to have a brand attached. A team of around 100 in Indianapolis, per The Hollywood Reporter, supporting a deep roster of original shows and a dedicated bench of writers, researchers, and editors working across multiple active cases at any given time. A direct relationship with fans through the Crime Junkie Fan Club app, merch, and live tours. A development pipeline that lets new shows inherit audience attention from the existing ones (this is killer when done correctly).

In early 2023, Flowers stepped out of the CEO seat and brought in an operator to run the business. She moved into Chief Creative Officer. Most podcasters at her scale never make that handoff. Most can't.

Eight months before the Tubi deal, in February 2025, Audiochuck took a $40 million minority investment from The Chernin Group, Peter Chernin's investment firm - the company's first outside capital. By October 2025, Audiochuck signed a multiyear deal with Tubi reportedly valued at $150 million, exiting SiriusXM and handing exclusive distribution and ad sales to Tubi Media Group, including a Crime Junkie FAST channel. I wrote about that deal in February in the context of creator IP traveling to non-native distribution surfaces.

What I underplayed in that piece was the operational layer underneath it. The Tubi conversation wasn't possible because Crime Junkie was a hit. Hits get offered deals all the time. Most creators in the moment of opportunity can't evaluate them, can't structure them, and can't execute on them, because the show consumes the bandwidth that the deal would require to run. (talked to a lot of creators about that as well, the deals that remain tantalizingly close to closing but just…haven't, which leaves potential millions on the table in addition to all the ways that new part grows their ecosystem)

The deal was possible because Flowers had spent years building a company underneath the show. A CEO who could run while she negotiated. Fresh capital that funded the next phase without forcing a sale. A roster of shows that meant the FAST channel had inventory beyond a single property. The operational slack that meant she could give the Tubi deal serious time without the wheel falling off.

Three Networks, Same Move

This isn't only a true crime story. The same architecture shows up across genres at different scales.

Bill Simmons and The Ringer is one shape. Simmons could have stayed a podcast host. Instead, he built a network of shows and a writer roster underneath the lead show, which Spotify acquired in 2020 in a cash deal valued at up to $196 million, with a portion deferred against performance and key executives remaining.

Crooked Media is another. Pod Save America was the lead, but the company became a multi-show network, a publishing arm, a live-tour business, and a political organizing surface. The hosts kept making the show. The company built the layers around it that absorbed everything else.

Barstool is a different shape again. Dave Portnoy started it as a free sports and gambling newspaper in 2003. The shows came later. By the time PENN acquired it, Barstool was a community and commerce engine with podcasts, video, live events, and merch stacked on top of the original audience. Different culture, different aesthetic, but the same structural decision: don't let the show be the company.

In every one of these, the founder didn't escape the wheel by working harder. They built operational capacity around themselves so the wheel could keep turning while the strategic work happened in parallel. Team. Format. Roles. Process. Content engineering. Hell, even a CRM. Yet it is exactly that kind of unsexy stuff that makes the sexy stuff possible.

The Size Question Is Smaller Than You Think

The first thing creators ask when they hear this is whether they're big enough to start. They almost always are.

You don't need to be Audiochuck-sized to build operational capacity. You need to know which piece comes next. A part-time producer who absorbs 10 hours a week of production load. A content engineering pass that turns one episode into three platform-native cuts without you touching them. A community manager who runs the engagement layer you've been doing yourself. An AI-assisted prep workflow. A standing format that means each new episode doesn't require a new creative decision tree.

Each of these buys back a few hours a week. Stack three or four of them and you suddenly have the mental (and emotional) load to actually plan something. That planning, run consistently, is what eventually compounds into the architecture that lets a creator take a call from Tubi without entering a state of panic.

The dangerous moment is when the heat is real and the wheel is full. Most creators wait until the heat starts to fade before they look at structural change. By then the leverage to build anything is gone. The window to construct durability is when the show is working and the operator can still feel the pressure of how unsustainable the current shape is.

The London creators were in that window at the same time. Both of them. Real heat, engaged community, no time. They didn't need a new show, they needed to get 10 hours a week of their life back.

That's where durable creator businesses actually start - in the unsexy operational layer that makes deals like Audiochuck's thinkable in the first place.

If your show is working and your calendar is full, the operator question is the one that matters right now. As they say on the airplanes, put your oxygen mask on first.

Thanks for reading and if this was useful, feel free to forward it to someone who should be thinking about this. Join a growing group of operators, creators, and strategists focused on how media actually works.