I've listened to The Diary of a CEO since the Social Chain days.
Steven Bartlett built it into a monster: roughly 800 episodes and 120+ million downloads and streams a month as of mid-2026. Spotify Wrapped ranked it the #2 podcast in the world in 2025.
And yet the show has drifted. Fewer founders, more longevity doctors and dating experts. If you came for the business, you're getting maybe one episode in five now.
So where do you go when you've binged the good ones?
I run a SaaS podcast myself and I listen to an unhealthy amount of this stuff (my screen time report is basically podcast apps and a code editor). These are the 8 shows I actually queue up when I want that DOAC feeling: long, honest conversations with people who built something real.
Quick note on how I picked these. Three filters:
→ The guest (or host) has actually built something, with numbers they'll say out loud.
→ Long-form. If the average episode is under 10 minutes it's a different sport (Hormozi is the one exception below, and he earns it).
→ Still publishing in 2026. No podcast graveyards.
Ranked by how often I actually finish an episode:
1. Profitable Founder Podcast
Full disclosure: this one's mine.
Every week I interview bootstrapped SaaS founders making between $100K and $10M a year, and I make them show their playbook. Real revenue numbers, real channels that got them there, and the mistakes they'd undo.
Here's why I built it this way. DOAC interviews people after they've won, when the story is polished and the hard parts are 10 years behind them. I wanted the opposite: founders who are mid-climb, close enough to their growth tactics that you can copy them this quarter.
I started it after paying $13,000 for a mastermind when I was stuck at $15-20K/mo with my own SaaS. Six months later I was at $75K/mo. The lesson stuck: proximity to slightly-further-ahead founders beats celebrity wisdom every time. The podcast is that proximity, for free.
No sponsor reads, no "tell me about your childhood" hour. Just the playbook.
Listen to the latest episode →
Best for: SaaS and bootstrapped founders who want tactics, not inspiration.
2. The Tim Ferriss Show
The blueprint DOAC was built on.
Over one billion downloads, 800+ episodes, picked for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times. Tim was doing the long-form deconstruction interview a decade before it was cool.
The difference from DOAC: Ferriss is a better interrogator. He goes granular. Not "what's your morning routine" but "what did you do in the first 60 minutes after that deal collapsed." The Naval Ravikant and Derek Sivers episodes alone are worth more than most business books.
Fair warning: like Bartlett, he's drifted from pure business into psychedelics, archery, and whatever else he's curious about. Cherry-pick the founder episodes.
Best for: tactics and routines from world-class operators, in every field.
3. My First Million
Sam Parr sold The Hustle to HubSpot. Shaan Puri sold Bebo to Twitch and later sold Milk Road. Now they sit around brainstorming business ideas every week.
This is the show I put on when DOAC feels too heavy. It's two rich friends riffing, but the riffing is dense: market sizes, cold DM scripts, breakdowns of weird niche businesses doing $10M a year that you've never heard of.
I covered my favorite episodes in a separate post on podcasts like My First Million if you want to go deeper down that hole.
Best for: business ideas and frameworks, delivered like a group chat.
4. Founders
One host, David Senra. One format: he reads a biography of a great entrepreneur, highlights the hell out of it, then talks for an hour about what he learned.
430 episodes in (episode 430 was literally "How to Write Ads That Sell"), and he's covered everyone from Rockefeller to Steve Jobs to Estée Lauder.
Why it scratches the DOAC itch: it's the same "how did this person actually do it" curiosity, but the subjects are dead or legendary, so there's no PR filter. Senra will tell you the founder was a maniac who slept in the factory. DOAC guests rarely admit that on camera.
It's also the best value-per-minute show on this list. Senra reads the 600-page book so you don't have to.
Best for: history's greatest entrepreneurs, minus the ghostwritten polish.
5. Modern Wisdom
Chris Williamson is the closest thing to Bartlett stylistically: British, ex-reality-TV and club promoter, obsessive self-improver, huge production quality.
He's past 1,140 episodes now and pulls the same caliber of guests (Hormozi, Goggins, Jordan Peterson, half of DOAC's back catalog honestly).
The difference is focus. Modern Wisdom leans psychology and performance over business. When a founder comes on, the conversation is about the internal game: ambition, status, burnout, why hitting the goal didn't feel like you thought it would.
I put this one on during long drives. It's the "work on yourself so the business works" complement to everything else here.
Best for: the psychology of ambitious people.
6. The Knowledge Project
Shane Parrish spent years at a Canadian intelligence agency before building Farnam Street, the mental-models blog Wall Street quietly reads.
His podcast is DOAC with the volume turned down and the signal turned up. No clips optimized for TikTok, no dramatic thumbnails. Just slow, careful conversations about decision-making with investors, CEOs, and researchers.
The tagline on the site says it straight: "the highest density of wisdom per episode of any show." That's marketing, but it's not wrong.
Best for: making better decisions, especially with money on the line.
7. How I Built This
Guy Raz has interviewed the founders of Airbnb, Spanx, Instagram, Patagonia, and hundreds more about the actual founding story: the doubt, the near-death moments, the lucky breaks.
It's the most produced show on this list (NPR roots, now on Wondery), and the storytelling is genuinely better than DOAC's. Every episode has an arc.
The trade-off: it's stories, not playbooks. You'll finish an episode inspired but without a to-do list. I treat it as founder therapy, proof that everyone you admire was also terrified and improvising.
Best for: founding stories told properly, when you need the morale boost.
8. The Game with Alex Hormozi
The anti-DOAC in format: mostly short solo episodes, zero guests, zero small talk.
Hormozi went from sleeping on the floor of his gym to building Acquisition.com, and the podcast (993 episodes and counting) is him handing out the frameworks: offers, pricing, sales, hiring.
Why it's on a DOAC-alternatives list anyway: Hormozi is DOAC's most-rewatched type of guest, and this is the uncut version of that guest, every single week. Ten-minute episodes you can finish between meetings.
If you liked his DOAC appearances, this is the firehose.
Best for: sales and offer tactics in 10-minute doses.
How to actually use this list
Don't subscribe to all 8. That's how you end up with 400 unplayed episodes and podcast guilt (I've been there).
My honest pairing advice:
→ Building a SaaS right now? Profitable Founder + The Game. Tactics only.
→ Want ideas and energy? My First Million + How I Built This.
→ Want to think better? Founders + The Knowledge Project.
→ Working on your own head? Modern Wisdom + the occasional DOAC.
And if you're specifically in product or SaaS, I ranked a different set of shows in my post on the best podcasts for SaaS founders.
FAQ
What podcast is most similar to The Diary of a CEO?
Modern Wisdom is the closest match: a British host, long-form interviews, big-name guests, and the same mix of business, psychology, and health. The Tim Ferriss Show is the closest match in interview depth, and it's the show DOAC's format descends from.
Is The Diary of a CEO still worth listening to?
Yes, selectively. The founder and business episodes are still excellent, and Bartlett now fact-checks episodes, which most shows don't. But at 120+ million downloads a month the show optimizes for the broadest possible audience, so business content is now a fraction of the feed. Cherry-pick instead of subscribing blindly.
What's the best DOAC alternative for SaaS founders specifically?
Profitable Founder Podcast (yes, mine, but that's exactly why I made it). Weekly interviews with bootstrapped SaaS founders between $100K and $10M a year, focused entirely on the playbook: pricing, channels, churn, and the numbers behind them. The Game with Alex Hormozi is the best pairing for sales and offers.
Are there shorter podcasts like Diary of a CEO?
The Game with Alex Hormozi is the pick: most episodes run 10 to 20 minutes, against DOAC's 90-minute-plus conversations. Founders is a middle ground, usually about an hour, but one self-contained story per episode.
Why did Diary of a CEO get so big?
Bartlett treated the podcast like a startup, not a hobby. He hired a full production team early, obsessed over YouTube packaging (the channel now sits at 15+ million subscribers), and widened the guest pool beyond business to health, psychology, and relationships. That last move is exactly why business listeners now need the shows on this list: the growth strategy that took DOAC to 120+ million monthly downloads is the same one that diluted the founder content.
