How to get booked on podcasts

Akshay Datt

Founder of Unnati and host of Founder Thesis, a long-form interview podcast with company founders. Over 400 episodes since 2020.

To get booked on podcasts, pitch one specific episode to a show whose listeners are your buyers, through the door the host publishes or through someone the host already trusts. Most B2B shows with a real audience publish no door at all. The guest form leads to the smaller rooms, and the introduction is how anyone gets into the larger ones.

Podcast guesting is a company putting its executives on other people’s shows instead of running its own. It rents an audience one conversation at a time, with no recording schedule, no guest pipeline and nothing to cancel.

Which B2B podcasts take guests?

Most interview-led B2B podcasts take guests, but few say how to reach them. Several of the biggest business shows are built not to need guests: Acquired and Founders are researched by their hosts, and Equity and Sharp Tech run on recurring hosts.

For an interview show, episodes a year is the number of chairs. A show publishing twice a week has to fill one more than a hundred times a year, and its host is looking for people as hard as you are looking for shows. The Transaction fills twenty.

Which podcasts are worth a guest appearance?

The ones whose listeners sign your contracts, which is rarely the same list as the ones with the most views. A CMO talking to The CMO Podcast’s few hundred viewers is in a room of peers. The same CMO on a general business show with ten times the audience is background.

The two lists do pull apart in one predictable way. Every show here with a published door draws between about 190 and 1,000 views an episode. The shows above 10,000 publish no way in at all. The open doors lead to small rooms.

YouTube views are the only audience number a guest can check from outside, and a channel’s subscriber count says little about them: subscribers to a company channel are not viewers of its podcast. Downloads are private to the host. Ask for the median downloads per episode over its first thirty days before agreeing to record, and compare it against a normal number of podcast downloads rather than against the guest’s hopes.

How do you pitch a podcast host?

Pitch the episode, not the executive. A host reads a pitch asking one question: what would this hour sound like, and would my listeners finish it?

What a pitch that gets answered contains:

• A title the host could publish. One argument, stated as a claim. “Why we stopped gating our content” beats “marketing leadership in a changing landscape”.
• Three points the conversation would cover, each with a number or a story only this guest has.
• Proof of listening. One recent episode named, and why this one would sit next to it.
• The logistics, settled. Remote, sixty minutes, any week the host chooses.

Matching marketplaces such as PodMatch connect hosts and guests by topic at volume, but they will not reach the senior shows, because those hosts book through people they already know. For the shows with no published door, the route is a past guest, an investor or a customer the host trusts, asked to make one introduction with the pitch attached.

Should the CEO be the podcast guest?

Send the person with the sharpest specific story, which is often not the CEO. Lenny’s Podcast publishes its guest policy, and the first criterion is that the guest is not a CEO or founder, with exceptions for legendary founders and for products builders are rushing to use. It also favours people who have done few other podcasts.

That inverts the usual instinct. A head of product who rebuilt onboarding and can walk through the numbers is a better booking than a chief executive with a vision talk, on the shows whose audiences are operators. A CEO earns the chair with a story nobody else in the company can tell: the raise, the pivot, the decision that nearly sank it.

Is podcast guesting better than starting a podcast?

Guesting is cheaper to start and cheaper to stop, and it answers one question before anything is built: do your buyers listen? A company show has to find and book about seventy people a year and the ones that stop do so after a median of about four years. A guesting program needs a short list and a calendar.

What guesting cannot buy is the thing a company show is best at: a standing reason to spend an hour with a specific senior person you want to know. The guest on someone else’s show meets the host. The host of their own show meets everyone on the list. If the goal is reach, guest. If the goal is access to named people, host.

How to start a podcast guesting program

1. Ask five customers what they listen to. The answer is a shorter and better list than any directory.
2. Check each show still publishes, and still takes guests. Drop any feed that has gone quiet for a quarter.
3. Find the door. A published form, the host’s contact page, or a past guest who will introduce you.
4. Pitch one episode per show, written for that show’s listeners, from the person with the story.
5. Ask for downloads before recording, and decide afterwards from who got in touch, not from how many listened.

Start with the two shows on the list that have both a published door and listeners who buy. Book those, and use the recordings as the introduction to the rooms that publish no door.

Frequently asked questions