'The Diary of a CEO' host Steven Bartlett explains how the '1% rule' has led to big results at his company

• Podcaster Steven Bartlett credited "embarrassingly small steps" with the growth of "The Diary of a CEO."
• Bartlett applies the 1% mindset, focusing on minor improvements to achieve a big impact.
• He said A/B testing titles and thumbnails has led to changes in click-through rates on his show.

"The Diary of a CEO" founder and host Steven Bartlett is one of the world's biggest podcasters — but to hear him tell it, he built his success by focusing on the tiny things, not the huge swings.

Bartlett has been a proponent of the 1% mindset, the idea that incremental steps can lead to continual improvement. On Maggie Sellers' "Hot Smart Rich" podcast, he spoke about how it had led to large changes at his media company.

Bartlett attributed his success to the concept of focusing on "embarrassingly small steps," which he referred to as the "secret philosophy everyone else ignores." He said he was inspired by a Harvard Business Review study that showed the motivational power of tiny wins on employees.

Bartlett said he applied that thinking to "DOAC" and thought if he kept changing the trajectory in tiny ways, like A/B testing titles and thumbnails, he could get a similar effect.

He said adding an exclamation mark to the end of a title resulted in a 0.2% increase in click-through rate, while changing the color of thumbnails from green to red increased the click-through rate by 1.4%.

Bartlett talked about another small change that impressed a big-name guest. He said an employee changed the air freshener in the "DOAC" studio before Spotify CEO Daniel Ek came to be interviewed on the show.

"Most people would think that was petty. But then Daniel walks in and goes, 'Man, it smells so good in here.' I go, '1%,'" Bartlett said.

These improvements also help build psychological momentum, he said, and are immediately executable.

"All of my competitors are just looking for the next leap forward in innovation in podcasting," he added.

Bartlett argued that the rule applied to staying ahead in business overall.

"No matter how much I've said it to people, it still doesn't appear to be obvious to anybody else," he said.

Bartlett has been known to take big swings, too.

He has experimented with using AI to clone his voice to make new podcasts, expanded his media company into a network of other shows, and made investments through his company FlightStory.

He also recently raised an eight-figure investment round to build what he calls "the Disney of the creator economy."