How to find podcast guests

Akshay Datt

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

Find podcast guests by working a named list rather than a search. Decide who you want in the room, source them through the people who already know them, and pitch the conversation instead of the show.

The part most launch plans miss is the scale. A weekly interview show has to find and book somewhere around seventy new people a year, every year. The sourcing problem is larger and more continuous than the launch plan assumes, and the shows in this category that publish most have solved it by needing almost no guests at all.

How many podcast guests does a podcast need?

An interview show needs one new guest per episode, which for a typical weekly B2B show means about seventy people a year. The busiest shows need close to two hundred.

That is the number the launch plan usually leaves out. Twelve episodes at launch is a manageable ask. Sustaining 71 conversations a year with people worth listening to is a different job, and it arrives in month four when the people you already knew have all been on.

Which podcast formats need fewer guests?

Panel and guestless formats decouple publishing volume from sourcing entirely. They publish as much or more, and need nobody.

Equity, from TechCrunch, published 108 episodes in the last twelve months on recurring hosts. Marketing Against The Grain published 92 with two HubSpot executives and no external booking. Acquired published 14 and has never needed a guest at all.

The pattern underneath: the shows that lasted did not get better at outreach. They removed the dependency. A show built on two internal hosts has no booking pipeline to maintain, no calendar to chase and nothing that stops when one person gets busy.

What that means for a company show. If the reason for the podcast is access to specific people, guests are the product and the sourcing cost is the price of the thing you actually want. If the reason is publishing consistently on a subject, a panel or research format gets you there without the pipeline.

Where do podcast guests come from?

Guests come from a named list, worked through warm paths. The order that works:

1. Write the list before the show launches. Fifty to a hundred named people you want in the room, by name and company, not by job title. If you cannot write fifty, the show has a positioning problem rather than a sourcing problem.
2. Route through people who already know them. The introduction converts at a completely different rate from a cold message, and every recorded conversation adds to the pool of people who can make the next one.
3. Past guests, deliberately. Ask every guest at the end of the recording who else should be on. The conversation just gave them a reason to answer.
4. Event speaker lists and published writing. Somebody who spoke at a conference last month has already agreed to talk about the subject in public and has a prepared argument.
5. Guest directories such as PodMatch and MatchMaker. These work at the volume end and match on topic. They will not produce the senior names, because the people you most want are not listed in a marketplace.

How do you get a senior guest to say yes?

Pitch the conversation, not the show. A senior person is not evaluating your download numbers, because they cannot see them and would not care. They are deciding whether the next hour is worth an hour.

What moves that decision:

• Who is asking. A partner, a founder or a practitioner gets a yes that a producer with a booking template does not. This is the reason the host matters more than the production.
• A specific question only they can answer. Not “we would love to have you on to discuss AI”. Name the decision they made and say you want to walk through it.
• Evidence you did the work. One reference to something they published, said or shipped, accurate and recent.
• A defined ask. Sixty minutes, remote, one link, no preparation required, and you handle everything else.
• Who else has been on. The guest list is the credential. This compounds, which is why the first ten are the hardest and year two is easier than year one.

What does guest sourcing cost in time?

Sourcing is a continuous job rather than a launch task. For a weekly show needing roughly 50 to 75 people a year, the recurring work is list maintenance, outreach, follow-up, scheduling, rescheduling and prep. Every one of those repeats per guest.

The failure mode is specific and it is the most common reason company shows stop: booking becomes somebody’s unpaid second job, and when that person’s priorities change there is no pipeline. Shows tied to one internal champion stop when that champion moves, and the feed goes quiet without any decision being made.

Two things prevent it. Name the person who owns booking, in writing, as part of their actual role. Or pick a format that does not have a booking pipeline to lose.

How far ahead should you book?

Book far enough ahead that a cancellation does not create a gap. For a weekly show that means four to six recorded conversations in hand at any time, which is roughly six weeks of buffer.

Senior guests cancel and reschedule, often more than once, and the calendar is the constraint rather than the willingness. A show recording the week it publishes has no absorption for that, and the first serious cancellation becomes a missed week. Missed weeks are how a weekly show becomes fortnightly, which is the pattern that precedes half the shows in this category going quiet.

Frequently asked questions