How to Choose Which Podcasts to Pitch

Choosing which podcasts to pitch comes down to five checks: does the audience match your actual buyer, is the show interview format and open to outside guests, has it published recently, does your specific angle fill a gap the host hasn't already covered, and what tier is it in. Skip download counts. A list built on those five checks beats a list built on fame, every time.

Does the show's audience actually match your buyer?

A show with 50,000 downloads and a listener base of consumer app users is worse for a B2B SaaS founder than a show with 2,000 downloads and a listener base of operations leaders. Download count tells you reach. It tells you nothing about who's listening.

Before you add a show to your list, ask who the host built it for. Read the last five episode descriptions. Look at the guest lineup from the last two months. If those guests sell to the same person you sell to, that's audience overlap, and it matters more than any vanity number the show publishes.

This is the filter most DIY guesting fails at. A founder chases the biggest name on a list and gets a bump in downloads that never turns into a client conversation, because the people listening were never in the market for what he sells.

Is it interview format, and does it actually take outside guests?

Plenty of shows that look like interview podcasts from the cover art are actually two co-hosts talking to each other, or a solo host doing monologue episodes with a guest slot that hasn't been used in months. Confirm interview format before you do anything else. Pull up the last 10 episodes. Count how many feature a guest who isn't a regular on the show. If the answer is zero or one, the show either doesn't take outside guests anymore or books so rarely that your odds are close to zero no matter how good your pitch is.

This check takes five minutes per show and eliminates a large share of candidates before you waste time on research or outreach.

Has the show published recently, or did it already stall out?

Podcasting has a churn problem, and it's worse than most guesting checklists admit. Of the podcasts that launched in the first half of 2026, 41.7% had already gone inactive by June 30 (Podchaser, 2026). Zoom out further and the picture doesn't improve much: Listen Notes counted 3.79 million podcasts in its index this year, but only 435,218, about 11.6%, had published a new episode so far in 2026 (Listen Notes, 2026).

That means roughly nine out of ten shows sitting in a "best podcasts for founders" listicle are not actively publishing anymore. Pitching one of them isn't a rejection. It's an email that nobody will ever read. Check the publish date on the most recent episode before you do anything else with a show. Two months of silence is a hard pass, not a maybe.

Does your angle fit this show specifically, or just your bio?

A generic pitch about "scaling a startup" gets ignored because every guest offers some version of it. What gets a yes is an angle tied to something the host's audience is actually dealing with right now, and that the show hasn't already covered from three other guests this quarter.

Pull the show's last 15 to 20 episode titles. Note the topics that keep repeating and the ones that are conspicuously absent. Your pitch should sit in that gap: close enough to the show's lane that the host trusts you belong there, specific enough that it isn't a rerun. How to find a podcast pitch angle hosts want walks through building that angle in more detail.

What is the host's engagement style, and why should you care?

Two shows can have the same download numbers and be worth completely different amounts of your time. Listen to how the host runs an episode. Does the host let guests actually finish points, or talk over them to get to the next question? Does the host promote episodes after they go live, tag guests, share clips? Does the host respond to comments or just post and move on?

A host who engages actively turns one appearance into ongoing visibility. A host who publishes and disappears gives you one episode and nothing after it. This is a five-minute listen to one recent episode, not a deep audit, but it changes how much a booking is actually worth.

Which show tier should you target first?

This is the part most guesting advice gets backwards. Founders chase big-name shows because the name feels like it will matter more, and then wonder why nothing comes back. The pitch acceptance data doesn't support that instinct. The median acceptance rate across pitches is around 5%, one in twenty, but the spread runs from under 1% up to 40% depending almost entirely on how well matched the pitch is to the show (Podchaser, 2026). Big-name shows sit at the bottom of that range. Well-matched niche and mid-tier shows sit at the top.

Chasing big shows with poor odds wastes time that would go further on three or four well-matched niche shows. That's not a consolation prize. For most founders, a niche show with a hundred of the right listeners produces more actual conversations than a big show with ten thousand of the wrong ones.

A process you can run this week

1. Build a raw list of 40 to 50 candidate shows. Pull from guest appearances by people who sell to your buyer, from category pages on Convokast's podcast directory, and from shows your own customers already listen to.
2. Run the format and activity check on each one. Interview format, outside guests in the last 10 episodes, a new episode in the last two months. Cut anything that fails either test. This alone usually removes half the list.
3. Score what's left for audience overlap. Who is the guest lineup selling to. Does that match your buyer. Rank the survivors instead of treating them as a flat list.
4. Sort the ranked list into tiers. Niche and mid-tier shows go to the top of your outreach queue. Save the one or two big-name shows for after you have a few recent appearances to point to.
5. Write one angle per show, not one pitch for all of them. Tie it to a gap in that show's last 15 episodes.

Six or seven hours of focused work turns a vague idea of "getting on podcasts" into a ranked list you can start pitching Monday. If you want the angle-writing and outreach done for you against a list like this, every target show still gets your sign-off before it's pitched: see how Convokast works or get in touch.

If you're doing this yourself and want a faster way to turn a show and an angle into a pitch you can send today, use the pitch generator.