the title is most of the episode

monday i did a pre-interview with a third time founder building a team of ai agents for b2b sales. he was about to fly overseas, and starting a raise the week after.

so i gave him the quick version of how the show works.

"if you go to my website and you just scroll down, you'll see that i've done, you know, i don't know, maybe 600, 700 interviews now." about 70 percent founders, 30 percent investors. it's live, with no editing after. a 20 minute show inside a 30 minute slot.

then i gave him his homework. review the google doc. delete any question you don't like. and pick a title... bold one of the options or suggest something catchier.

and i told him what i tell every guest. the title is 60 to 70 percent of the battle.

that's my read after all those interviews, not a study. you can have a great conversation and a forgettable title, and almost nobody finds out it was great.

the title is the only part a stranger sees. they're scrolling. they don't know you. they don't know your guest. they give you one line to decide if the next twenty minutes are worth it. everything good inside the episode is invisible until that line earns the click.

so the title can't be an afterthought, and on a live show it can't be fixed later. a live stream doesn't get renamed in the edit, because there is no edit. the title has to be right before we go live.

that's why every prep doc carries ten title options, each with a one line reason it might work.

some make the pivot a promise. some lead with a real number that stops a viewer mid scroll. some take a contrarian line people will want to argue with. different hooks for different guests.

having ten matters more than any one of them. the guest reads the list and reacts. one makes them wince, one makes them laugh, one makes them say that's it. the reaction tells you more than any brainstorm would.

and the guest's name and company go at the end, so the hook doesn't have to share the spotlight.

that one surprises people. founders want their company name first. but a stranger doesn't know your company yet. the hook is what makes them care enough to read the name.

you see it in your own scrolling. you don't click because of who's on the episode. you click because a line made you curious, or annoyed, or worried you're missing something. then you look at who said it.

the guest picks, because the guest knows their story better than i do. and a guest who chose the title shares the episode like it's theirs. because it is.

it's like the front window of a shop. you can have the best stuff on the street in the back room. if the window is boring, people walk past.

and this goes way past podcasts. your subject line is a title. the first slide of your deck is a title. the first line of your post is a title. most people only ever see that line, and it decides whether they see anything else.

long term, ai is going to flood every feed with competent content. competent is free now. what gets the click is the line that makes one specific person stop. whoever can write that line, or pick the right one out of ten, keeps an edge.

you can scroll through the titles yourself on the show page... and see which ones you'd click.

so take the last thing you published. if the title was all anyone saw... would they have read the rest?