- The Tiger Sisters are taking their podcast to Vox Media with an eye toward expansion.
- Founders Cherie and Jean Luo bootstrapped the 2-year-old show to the top of the business pod charts.
- They shared how they built the show to last and their first big brand extension.
The creators who call themselves your "Silicon Valley and Wall Street big sisters" are looking to level up their media brand.
The Tiger Sisters are joining the Vox Media Podcast Network, they shared exclusively with Business Insider.
Vox will take on sales, marketing, and distribution for the show, which often cracks Spotify's top 10 business podcasts and has peaked at No. 1 for business and No. 3 for all podcasts in the US on Spotify. The show has over 200,000 subscribers on YouTube, with popular episodes like "Everything We Learned in 29 Minutes at Harvard Business School" and "Never Start an Email With 'Hope You're Well.'"
Founders Cherie and Jean Luo have branched out to a Substack and plan to go on the road with their first live tour next spring, with stops in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Toronto.
The sisters are an example of professionals who have parlayed their careers into full-time content creation — appealing to an educated, female audience that advertisers want to reach.
The Tiger Sisters deal also represents another step into the creator economy by Vox, whose network is already home to born-on-social creators like "Your Rich BFF" Vivian Tu and Lemonade Stand alongside long-established voices like Ina Garten and Kara Swisher.
"The through line for everybody is that they have a lot of expertise and a strong point of view and something to share that people will learn from," said Lillian Xu, VP of Vox Media's podcast business. "And Tiger Sisters has that across a lot of different areas in career growth, in friendships."
Xu said the Tiger Sisters offered a strategic guidebook to work and life that fit well with Vox's established business and tech podcasts.
Plans for a live tour
The sisters, who bootstrapped their business and have roped in six-figure brand partnerships on their own, decided it was time to bring on help so they could focus on the content. Earlier this year, they signed with the talent agency WME.
"Everything that we've done so far has been very scrappy, and it's been really well received," said Jean Luo, 37. "But we are so ready for that next stage where we scale."
Their idea for a live tour was solidified when they did their first event in May, in the middle of the day in downtown Los Angeles. The free event at the Spotify Theater drew 150 people and featured a variety-style act, singing, and a meet-and-greet.
"We have those crazy, crazy ambitions, but we're actually very measured and practical in how we build to get there," Jean Luo said.
"We're just trying to figure out what is the next right medium to expand as we have the podcast that definitely has traction now and is going to be our foundational format," said Cherie Luo, 31. "We're like: Where else can we go to reach our mission and our goal of uplifting and empowering a billion women?"
The Tiger Sisters formula
The Luo sisters grew up on Long Island in a first-generation Chinese-American home and had followed a traditional path before starting the podcast in 2024: Ivy League degrees, MBAs, Goldman Sachs, LinkedIn.
Cherie Luo was making dance videos during the pandemic, but when a post about how she picked her undergrad classes took off, she knew she was sitting on info that was valuable to others. Jean joined her, and they started Tiger Sisters as a bootstrapped, two-person operation with money they had saved. They've also launched Sisters Matcha, a matcha tea company, inspired by Cherie Luo's time interning on a tea farm in Japan.
Over time, the Tiger Sisters have introduced more emotional content and responded to audience questions. This month, they launched a three-part series on friendship.
Creators have to think about how long their appeal can endure. The sisters think they've hit on an evergreen formula that combines research with their own experiences and presents it in a case-study format. For the friendship episodes, they presented research from Harvard and Stanford, for example.
"We're going to be doing this for as long as we can, as long as we're adding value and there's viability, and our audience keeps telling us they want to hear more," Cherie Luo said. "I think our audience also understands that the content evolves as our lives evolve."