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Sisäpiiri 15 · Tools · first published 2023-08-16

Past Rahapodi in 2024 | Kevin van Dessel | Negotiator Insider 15

In August 2023 Kevin van Dessel of Sijoituskästi sat on Sami Miettinen's subscriber side and said Nordnet's Rahapodi would be overtaken in 2024. The episode is a rare document of two competing podcasters taking each other's business model apart out loud: algorithmic media versus subscription media, volume versus quality, and the structural observation that Rahapodi's makers have no upside. This write-up reports the conversation and then checks what actually happened — as of September 2026 the prediction has come true, and it came true through exactly the mechanism they identified.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: Tools and Implementations + AI and the Economy

Past Rahapodi in 2024 | Kevin van Dessel | Negotiator Insider 15

Summary: In August 2023 Kevin van Dessel of Sijoituskästi sat on Sami Miettinen’s subscriber side and said Nordnet’s Rahapodi would be overtaken in 2024. The episode is a rare document of two competing podcasters taking each other’s business model apart out loud: algorithmic media versus subscription media, volume versus quality, and the structural observation that Rahapodi’s makers have no upside. This write-up reports the conversation and then checks what actually happened — as of September 2026 the prediction has come true, and it came true through exactly the mechanism they identified.

A note on reading this

The recording is from 16 August 2023, and it is the subscriber-side continuation of the public episode Qt and Revenio delivered a beating, recorded the same day. Four caveats:

1. Why Rahapodi was the right benchmark

Miettinen’s description is blunt: Rahapodi is the whale of the segment. When Miikka Luukkonen and Martin Paasi publish on Thursdays it goes to number one — so reliably that Miettinen prefers not to publish on Thursdays himself, because coming second is irritating.

The first strategic observation is about channel structure, and it is sharper than it sounds:

The hosts have personal contracts, but Nordnet’s YouTube channel carries all sorts of other things, Traders Club and the rest. On the podcast side it is only Rahapodi, and it stays in its own box.

From which they draw the conclusion immediately: the podcast is easier to attack than the channel. On the audio side you face one programme; on YouTube you face an entire company’s channel with all its other content.

2. Which to attack — audio or YouTube

This is the sharpest single distinction in the episode, and it is usable by anyone making content for two platforms at once.

Podcast platforms (Spotify, Apple) YouTube
Discovery subscription media — you have to know what you are looking for algorithmic media — the front page offers
Shape of growth steady, accumulates gradually discontinuous, one video can explode
Ceiling subscribers times conversion in principle the whole audience

Van Dessel’s formulation of the algorithm’s power is the clearest thing in the episode:

If you are genuinely good and make good content for a long time, you can get a video onto everyone’s front page — this is the best video for all of you. That is how you get really big numbers on YouTube.

The 2023 figures, as stated in the episode:

Miettinen’s advice is unambiguous: attack on the YouTube side. The audio side, he says, is hard to pull, because there is no algorithm working for you.

He also makes a self-critical observation that matters for this write-up: commercial collaborations flatten episodes. They carry a “small sales vibe”, they get too specific, and they are not as broadly interesting.

3. Volume: a model that works for one and not the other

The benchmark taken is Puheenaihe, where Rami Kurimo and Leevi Leivo publish three to four hour-plus episodes a week with the aim of keeping up with Joe Rogan’s cadence. Miettinen’s description is that they simply “crush” it with volume.

And then the episode’s most honest moment: Miettinen states that he has no chance in that game. He does investment banking work and can manage one episode a week. Van Dessel suggests hiring a team and outsourcing the editing, but Miettinen does not claim that solves it.

The conclusion is explicit and it splits the game in two: volume is Kevin’s weapon, not Sami’s. If Miettinen is going to win, it has to be by something else.

4. The structural observation: the makers have no upside

This is the intellectually weightiest part of the episode, and the only one that is not about content at all.

Once a week is their system and they will not change it, because they get the salary and, as far as I know, no particular bonus for it. There is no more upside from doing more than one a week.

The claim, then: a salaried maker optimises workload, an owning maker optimises growth. From which it follows that a volume attack is safe, because the defender cannot answer it even if they wanted to.

This is inference from outside and not knowledge of Nordnet’s contracts — the episode says “as far as I know”. It is still the episode’s best prediction, and section 7 shows why.

The other weaknesses they name:

5. What a challenger can do better

Three levers, in the order the episode presents them.

Quality of guests and questions. According to van Dessel, you can ask a good guest either a rubbish question or a good one, and the difference is preparation. At Sijoituskästi Teemu Liila listens to the guest’s biography before the episode if one exists, and out of that come questions nobody has asked before.

Kit and the wow effect. Sijoituskästi had just invested in 4K cameras and lighting for roughly the monthly salary of an average Finn. Miettinen’s anecdote on the same subject is the funniest thing in the episode: he was the first guest in Rahapodi’s new studio, where you sat on a sofa, and asked the camera operator to shoot from below looking up.

Partnerships and politics. Miettinen works in the same studio as Ivan Puopolo and appears on Viikon viisastelu about every other week; Puopolo does the production, so it costs Miettinen an hour. Out of this comes the episode’s most strategic question: should he jump into the politics bin? Van Dessel’s answer rests on data rather than opinion — political topics pull extremely well, and Sijoituskästi’s most-listened episode was a debate between two politicians answering questions from Twitter. Their names remained indistinct in the transcript and are not given here.

6. The secret weapon: one episode, 30 clips, six platforms

The most concrete trade secret in the episode, which van Dessel volunteers unprompted.

Sijoituskästi has a five-person team, three of them media professionals who edit. From a single 60-minute episode they make about 30 micro clips. What matters is not the number of clips but what happens to them:

Every single one can go viral on TikTok — and at the same time on YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Six platforms, each independently.

In August 2023 that produced, by their account, about five million views a month on TikTok alone, and Sijoituskästi had more TikTok followers than Nordnet. Miettinen’s reaction is direct: there you have already won this game, because Rahapodi is effectively absent.

Miettinen also sets out his own obstacle honestly, and it has two parts: he does not like TikTok, and automatic Finnish subtitling for vertical clips did not exist for him. In the free service he used, the Finnish translation queue did not always let him through. Sijoituskästi’s editors subtitle by hand, because they want to animate every word separately.

The ending is conciliatory: let’s not make this a contest, but we are gaming past Rahapodi.

7. What actually happened — checked on 12 September 2026

This section is not from the episode. It was made three years later, and every figure is sourced (see Sources). The figures given in the episode have been left in sections 1–6 as they stand and have not been retrofitted.

The prediction came true, and in the year named

Year Sijoituskästi in Spotify’s Finnish top 10 Rahapodi
2023 not listed not listed
2024 #9 not listed
2025 #1 in all of Finland, all genres not listed

Van Dessel named 2024. Spotify’s own year-end summary put Sijoituskästi in Finland’s top ten for the first time in exactly 2024, and Rahapodi was not on the list in any year. In 2025 Sijoituskästi was the most-listened podcast in Finland across all genres.

The position on 12 September 2026:

A clarification. Finland publishes no official per-programme download measurement — Finnpanel reports only total listening. “Most listened” therefore rests on the Spotify and Apple charts, which measure popularity inside a platform rather than total audience. The gap is nevertheless so large and so consistent across measures that the conclusion does not depend on the choice of metric.

Where they were more right than they knew

The claim in section 4 was that Rahapodi’s makers have no upside in doing more. It did not stay theoretical:

So the competitor did not merely fall behind: it lost its lead host, spent half a year on hiatus and split in two — and the half that left now does better than the half that stayed. The incentive argument made in the episode predicted precisely this, even though it was framed as a question about volume rather than about staff.

Where the analysis did not go quite as expected

Two clarifications that are honest to state.

The channel choice was not either/or. The episode spent a long time on whether to attack audio or YouTube, and Miettinen recommended YouTube because the algorithm does the work. Sijoituskästi won on both — but the public evidence of the overtaking comes specifically from the audio side (Spotify’s year-end summary), the side the episode treated as harder. The algorithm was a correct analysis of YouTube’s mechanics, but it was not the measure on which the matter was publicly settled.

The host’s own side went exactly as he predicted. Miettinen said in the episode that he could not play the volume game and would happily take bronze. That is what happened: in September 2026 Neuvottelija is not among the 200 most-listened podcasts on Spotify in Finland, while Sijoituskästi is #1 and Puheenaihe #11. This article sits on his own site, so it is worth saying plainly rather than leaving out.

The TikTok figure cannot be verified. The August 2023 claim of five million monthly views was van Dessel’s own and has no public source. In September 2026 Sijoituskästi’s TikTok account has 90,800 followers, 6.5 million likes and 1,798 videos — consistent with large monthly viewing but not proof of it. The “over 2.5 million listeners a month” that appears in the influencer agency’s marketing material is a sales claim, not an independent measurement.

The micro-clip strategy turned into a business

The secret weapon of section 6 did not stop at reach. Sijoituskästi Media Oy (founded January 2023, Kevin van Dessel chair of the board, Teemu Liila chief executive) grew its revenue from €137,000 (2023) to €239,000 (2024) and €512,000 (2025), with operating profit of about €182,000 in 2025. The company is still owned by its founders and employs two people; there is no sign of a sale to a media group. Recognition: Nordnet’s own Investment Deed of the Year 2023 and a Tubecon Awards 2026 prize as podcast influencer of the year.

Which makes the argument in section 4 symmetrical: the owning maker got the upside, and it shows in the accounts.

Claims presented as claims

What stays with you

  1. Incentive structure predicts better than content does. The episode’s sharpest observation was not about the quality of the programmes but about who has reason to do more. Three years later both sides went exactly as the incentives said.
  2. Subscription media and algorithmic media are different games. In one, growth accumulates; in the other, it explodes — and the same content can succeed in one and fail in the other.
  3. Reuse has a higher multiple than new production. One hour-long episode as thirty clips on six platforms is a different business from one hour-long episode.
  4. A volume strategy requires a team. Recognising that he could not do it was the episode’s most honest moment — and also a correct prediction.

Sources

The check in section 7, retrieved 12 September 2026:

How the episode runs

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