These Creators Broke the Rules and Built a Hit Podcast. What’s Next?

Katie Gatti Tassin, of Money With Katie, and her podcasting partner Caro Claire Burke, author of 2026’s breakout hit book Yesteryear, broke all the rules.

They produce Diabolical Lies, a two-hour, twice-monthly, audio-only podcast where they can talk, largely on their own terms, about subjects ranging from pop culture to abortion—including an episode arguing that Republicans’ efforts to restrict abortion and contraception are rooted in a desire to push women toward pregnancy and traditional gender roles.

They don’t have video to clip or “clickbaity snippets to try to drive” traffic, they don’t spread the word on social media, they don’t take sponsorships and they redistribute money, including $35,000 in food aid to Gaza and $15,000 to The Young Center, which provides legal representation to immigrant children.

They broke the rules, and they broke them on Substack because they’re pretty sure no one else—read, mainstream media—would have allowed them to put on a two-hour show just twice a month.

It nonetheless worked. They’re making money, and their audience tends to be die-hard fans, the kind who snapped up their first merch drop in December in less than a week.

But after failing to make this year’s TIME100 Creator list—for which Substack, their home platform, had nominated them—they got to thinking about what went wrong.

While they have some 20,000 people paying them $8 a month (or $5.99 on Apple), they think there’s a greater audience out there that simply isn’t going to find them unless they go into video and get on YouTube.

“The fact that we’re only in that one place and not on video, there is a sense that you’re not like a real podcast until you’re on YouTube,” Tassin said. “I think that that is working against us right now.”

So they’re planning to start recording video in January, with full episodes and no clips for social, which could be taken out of context. The move isn’t about monetization, but acquiring viewers who could convert into paying subscribers.

Of how they got to where they are, Tassin said: “I don’t think there is any newspaper or magazine that would be totally comfortable with the subject matter of our show, and definitely not for the amount of money that we can make independently. But the one downside of independence is that lack of institutional prestige and legitimacy.”

That’s also something they’re looking to fix and they’ve already had a huge leg up with the success of Yesteryear.

More Than Money

The listener base for Diabolical Lies, Tassin believes, comes precisely from the decisions they made about how to structure the show, what they do with the revenue and the fact that they will not accept any corporate money.

“There’s just a degree of almost a feeling of ‘I like listening to these people, but I also appreciate the meta story of what they’re trying to do here with this project and how it came to be,’ and I think that that has allowed us to rely on word of mouth in a way that I don’t know if we could have if we had made more conventional choices,” Tassin told AMO in an interview.

“People were talking about it to their friends and sending the episodes to each other and it saw that type of growth on its own without a real distribution strategy.”

No marketing, tens of thousands of fans. It all started during the pandemic, on a whim, when Tassin created a personal finance blog called Money With Katie. Morning Brew brought her in about 18 months later, with a focus on building the brand in podcast and newsletter form. It now reaches more than 200,000 people.

But Tassin was getting the itch to talk more about politics and culture. So she left Morning Brew, maintained the Money With Katie brand, and created a feminist podcast with Burke. The thinking was: “We’re not going to get sponsors. We’ll just do the Substack model where you charge listeners for premium content, and, if it ends up working or being like a little extra pocket change, cool.”

It’s definitely become more than a little extra pocket change, but Tassin declined to share exact figures.

Burke had recently sold her now-bestselling book Yesteryear when they started the podcast. They’d expected the book to succeed, but not nearly to the extent it has—1.4 million copies sold from April to early August and 17 weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list.

“Her life has really radically changed over the last couple of months, but Diabolical Lies has also just become bigger than I think either one of us ever dreamed it could be,” Tassin said.

Ultimately, both of them really want to be writers. They don’t want to have to chase TikTok virality to reach the masses.

“I’m happy to be away from that multimedia side of things and to get back to the core of what I originally really liked, which was writing and thinking really hard about things that aren’t super straightforward,” Tassin said.

“In the long run, though, we’d love to have some sort of media business together,” Tassin said.

The Business

Business is going well for the pair. Tassin still runs Money With Katie and Burke has her bestseller, on top of the subscriptions from Diabolical Lies.

“It’s one means of making money which is contingent upon your audience continuing to like you and want to hear what you have to say. And in that respect, it’s very risky because, you have a couple bad takes in a row, and suddenly the trust is maybe damaged, and that takes time to rebuild,” Tassin said.

But so far, their retention rate has been “pretty good.”

What about the threat of AI? Tassin is focused on not just informing and educating, but also entertaining people, making them laugh and distracting them.

“It’s a form of escapism as much as it is information. It’s a tether to something that both makes you feel informed and also, oh, I’m enjoying myself for these two hours, and I’m cleaning my house, and I can listen to them banter,” Tassin said.

“I would probably feel differently about this if we were like barely scraping by, but right now I feel like we have room to go to to lose some subscribers and still make a very respectable living.”

Legitimacy

While legacy media companies are chasing creators—see Forbes launching a creator network, Disney putting TikTok creators on Disney+, and Vox building valuable franchises around personalities like Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway—Burke and Tassin are, in turn, looking to break into legacy media.

Why? Legitimacy, and the fact that they keep seeing creator ideas ending up in legacy media anyway, with the credit going to other reporters and writers.

Tassin said:

“It would be pitching some of these concepts to more traditional outlets. So rather than only bringing Caro an episode about the rise and fall of the girl boss, it would be we’re gonna do an episode about it, but I’m also going to pitch The Cut on this angle and see if I can get something placed there that then drives back to the show, just to get, quote unquote, credit for these ideas in a more mainstream place and to build that persona a little more fully and a little less insularly than just having it on on the show, to establish ourselves more as thinkers.”

Partnering with big media outlets can also give independent operators access to the kind of distribution and reach they can’t easily achieve on their own.

Both Tassin and Burke want to be known as writers, and Tassin believes legacy media still offers the quality and credibility that can set them apart. For all the success they’ve found by breaking the rules and building outside traditional media, there are still some things independence can’t provide.

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