Crime Junkie's Investigative Transformation

Ashley Flowers' Crime Junkie Podcast Success Story

Shaan shares the remarkable story of Ashley Flowers, creator of Crime Junkie, the second most popular podcast in America.

"This 36-year-old podcaster is making $45 million a year of profit. She's working at a normal day job and she grew up loving Agatha Christie stories, these mystery crime stories. So much so that she joined Crime Stoppers, a local crime stopping organization in her town. It was supposed to just help people report crimes to one central place.

To promote the organization, she volunteers and says, 'What if I create a weekly radio show called Murder Monday?' She does it and realizes people kind of like this. She's just doing this for fun, volunteering on the side of her day job.

Then she hears the Serial podcast when it comes out and becomes this phenomenon. She listens to it and says, 'What if I do Murder Monday type of radio show that I'm just doing for my local org, but what if I did it as a podcast?'

She jumps in back in 2017, records, comes home from her day job, records her first episode, uploads it, and off to the races. Now here we are later, she's got 65 employees. Her business just raised $40 million from Chernin, has valued the company at $250 million, and has a reported $45 million of EBITDA per year.

She started off just taking existing shows and now has a team of 10 journalists that do original reporting. She now has another show called The Deck where she works with local cops and they give her access to evidence and they try to actually solve cold cases. She is basically the Mr. Beast of true crime. She took a very simple idea, took it very seriously, and scaled it up. She has her own journalists, scours the country for stories, partners with the cops, built a studio, has a hundred employees, and turned this into a full-on production company."