Morning Brew Daily – the winner of the 2025 Shorty Award for Best Business Podcast – covers the latest need-to-know news with wit, friendly banter, and a healthy dose of hot takes. Hosts Neal Freyman and Toby Howell make business content humorously informative and approachable across both their podcast and social channels. As the show has grown into a must-listen podcast for millions, our challenges have evolved. How can we continue to foster connection with our audience while we rapidly scale?
Since our last Shorty win, we’ve maintained our steady stream of can’t-miss daily episodes that keep listeners coming back for more. We’ve also found new, exciting ways to expand the show’s footprint beyond podcast feeds – launching live events, testing new social content strategies, and covering our biggest story yet. In an industry landscape where the very definition of “podcast” continues to evolve, we’re blazing trails for audience connection.
Our team researches stories each night in order to record episodes early each weekday morning, in time for daily commutes across the U.S. As soon as an episode’s out, prep for the next day begins. As a business news show, our priority is bringing our listeners all the news they need to start their day, through a business lens – even when we’re covering topics like Trump administration policies, we keep our focus on the ways major global events impact the business world. For example, our top episode of 2025 featured coverage of DOGE’s impact on federal jobs, leaning into the way the agency would be impacting employment for thousands of Americans rather than a political angle. This episode netted over 150K downloads, a record for a standard episode of the show. Our audience wanted to hear complex news explained by us in a clear, human tone, prioritizing real-world impact over political narratives. We strategically supplement our daily news coverage with interviews with business leaders our audience wants to hear from, including The Big Short author Michael Lewis and marketing expert Ashwinn Krishnaswamy (@shwinnabagobrand).
Our podcast has wide distribution – in addition to all major podcast platforms, we distribute our show on creator streaming platform Nebula, Yahoo! Finance OTT/CTV networks, X, and Octopus, a platform providing in-car entertainment for rideshare services. We’re able to reach broad audiences, but aim to go above and beyond to form lasting relationships with our listeners that get them to stick around in the long term.
One of the most significant investments we’ve made this year is developing a live event strategy to deepen our relationship with our most dedicated audiences. We hosted sold-out live trivia nights with Neal and Toby in New York City, reaching existing fans and net new audience members, and held a year-end show at The Bell House, our biggest live event to date. As Gen Z seeks out “Fourth Spaces” that blend digital interests and real-life experiences (source: Eventbrite), our live events offer an opportunity to build meaningful community, as fans get to know one another through a night of games and form peer-to-peer connections. Anecdotally, we’ve heard about several friend groups and first dates meeting at our events!
To keep social media audiences engaged, we offer more than just clips from our podcast. New social videos hosted by our podcast producers cover stories exclusively for social – even if you’ve already heard a full episode, there’s value in following our accounts for additional business news delivered in a fun, fast-paced format. We’ve also experimented with incorporating more behind-the-scenes content into our strategy, which has driven strong engagement on our social channels.
As our audience has grown organically, we’ve also been able to develop bespoke brand partnerships that go far beyond the standard ad read. In January 2026, we took the pod on the road for the first time, flying to the World Economic Forum at Davos in partnership with Lightspeed Ventures. Our team set up a custom podcast studio in Lightspeed’s Davos house, creating our most cinematic video episodes to date. We interviewed founders from cutting-edge companies across Lightspeed’s portfolio in YouTube-exclusive bonus episodes, and published real-time social video highlights from the conference. Audience sentiment around the partnership was extremely positive, as loyal fans were excited to see their favorite news creators given firsthand access to one of the biggest events in the business world.
Downloads increased 21% year-over-year, growing to over 32M downloads in 2025. Our social content earned over 131 million views across platforms in 2025, and our follower count has grown to over 230K followers across platforms. Our podcast audience is primarily made up of Gen Z and Millennial listeners – 85% of our audience falls in the 18-44 demo. We reached hundreds of attendees across our live events, and are scaling up our plans for 2026 after 2025’s successful proof-of-concept run. Today’s podcast landscape demands shows adapt to a multiplatform landscape, empowering audiences to choose how, when, and where they want to engage with a show. As we continue to thrive on audio, video and social and connect with listeners offline, we set the standard for industry peers, defining creator-forward growth strategies that cut through the noise.