he looked me up and found nothing... how to get high profile guests on your podcast

today i got vetted.

a serial founder with about thirty years behind him asked to meet me before he'd agree to come on the show. he's raised more than a billion dollars across his companies, with top-tier backers. he doesn't need the exposure. he doesn't want deal flow from it.

he'd tried to look me up first. he hadn't heard of the show, and he couldn't find much about it online. so he wanted a call.

fair enough. i'd do the same.

he told me why he's careful about podcasts.

"there's just so much poser bullshit that goes on in my world that i kind of don't want to be a party to it."

he's not wrong. a lot of startup content is people performing success for each other. he only wants to share an alternative investor perspective for founders. something useful. and he wasn't going to lend his name to something he couldn't check.

so we talked. i told him my story. the audience, roughly seventy percent founders and thirty percent investors. why the show exists. his read was cautiously positive, which from someone like him is a good result.

and then he did the thing every serious person does. his team is going to watch a couple of episodes, read the prep doc, and check that the bio we wrote about him is accurate. then he'll decide.

if you're wondering how to get high profile guests on your podcast, that's your answer. they don't decide based on your pitch. they decide based on what they find when they go looking.

the best guests vet you the same way the best investors and the best customers do. they ignore your email and check your footprint. what have you published? who else has sat in that chair? does the prep doc read like you did your homework, or like a template with their name pasted in?

your archive is the credential. every episode you've already done is a reference you didn't have to ask for.

and the bio check is the quiet test inside the test. if you get a high-profile person's story wrong in the prep, you've told them how careful you'll be with it on air. precision is respect.

and notice what he did not ask for. he did not ask for my download numbers. he did not ask who else was booked. he asked to see the work. the episodes, the prep, the bio. the things you can only fake for so long.

that is the same diligence a good investor runs on a founder. they skip the deck and call two customers. they read what you published a year ago, before you needed anything from them. the record you build when nobody is checking is the one that gets checked.

it's like a restaurant with no reviews. the food might be incredible. but the person who eats out for a living walks past it and into the place with three hundred photos on the menu board.

this was a useful kick for me. the show has hundreds of conversations behind it, and if someone like him can't find them, that's my problem to fix, not his.

long term, the footprint compounds. every guest who says yes makes the next yes easier, because the next person can see who came before. the first hundred episodes are the hardest because nobody can see them yet. after that, the archive starts doing the inviting for you.

if you want to see what his team is going to review, the episodes are on the show page.

so if the person you most want to reach looked you up tonight... what would they find?