Fifteen, Thirty, Fifteen

Part 01Before anyone says yes

Chapter 01The list is the strategy

You've started running a show. Maybe you already had one and it never paid for itself, or maybe you named it last week. Either way, this book is for your first month. It's short on purpose, so you can read it in one sitting and know what to do on Monday.

I wrote the why in another book, The Spotlight. Here's the whole argument in one paragraph. A stranger won't give you time or money because you asked, and almost everyone asks. Invite the same stranger to tell their story on your show and the inbox works differently. The gatekeeper walks the email upstairs instead of binning it, the person shows up as a peer, and the conversation you have on air is the discovery call they never would have taken. Everything below is how I run that, week after week, after more than 650 interviews on The Sunny Ray Show.

One thing before we start. The show is yours. You invite the people you want to do business with onto your show, and you're the host. Mine only comes up in this book as the place I learned the lessons.

Your guest list is your customer list

Write down who you'd most like to sell to, raise from or partner with. That's your guest list. There's no separate list of interesting people for the podcast and another for sales. The moment you keep two lists, the show turns into a hobby and the sales list goes back to getting pitched.

Be narrow. "Healthcare" is a category, not a list. Here's a composite of how it should look: a founder selling scheduling software to dental groups invites the owners and operations leads of dental groups with three or more clinics. Every name on that list could buy, and every one of them has a story about growing a practice that nobody has asked them to tell in public.

Next to each name, write one true thing you could only know if you'd looked. A clinic they opened, a post they wrote, a hire they announced. If you can't find one, the person stays on the list but goes to the back of it. You'll need that line for the invitation in the next chapter.

How many names do you have where you can write that line today?

Start with people who already know you

Your first ten or fifteen guests should be customers, partners and old colleagues. They'll say yes, they'll forgive a clumsy first episode, and you'll find your rhythm before you invite anyone cold. I tell everyone the same thing about this. You cook the first few dinners for friends, not for a critic.

Then widen it. Put the people on both sides of whatever loop you're stuck in on the same list, the buyers and the investors who want to see buyers. The same invitation works on both.

Who stays off it

Three groups never get an invitation. Anyone who has ever told you no, in any inbox, on any campaign. Anyone already in a live conversation with you, because an automated invite to someone you spoke with on Tuesday makes you look like a machine. And anyone you've already taped, unless you're inviting them back on purpose for a part two.

The first group is permanent. A no from someone is a no to every show, every sender name and every campaign you'll ever run. Keep that list in one place and check it before anything goes out.

Keep a proper record

For every single person, keep their name in full, their company, their email and the reason you picked them. It sounds like admin. I learned the cost the hard way. When we went to write to our own past guests in August, we found the archive had stored a first name and nothing else for 146 episodes. That's 121 people who'd sat down with me on camera and said yes once already, and our record of them was thinner than our record of strangers.

Your past guests turn into the warmest list you'll ever own. Treat the record like it's worth money, because later it will be.

This week

Write the one-sentence definition of who you invite, then put 25 names under it, each with one checkable line about what they've done. Start the do-not-contact list on the same page, even if it's empty.

Chapter 02The invitation

This email has one job, which is to get a yes to a short first call. It isn't there to explain your company, prove your credibility or sell anything. Every sentence that tries to do one of those things makes the yes less likely.

What it says

Keep it short and plain. A greeting, one true sentence about them, the invitation and a question. Here's a composite, written for the dental software founder from the last chapter:

Hi Dana, saw your post on cutting no-shows across your clinics. I host a show on how dental groups grow, and I'd love to have you on to tell that story. Twenty minutes, live, no fee and no pitch. Would you be up for it?

That's under fifty words. Nothing in it is about the sender's company. The subject line is a few lowercase words that look like a person typed them between meetings.

Notice the four words near the end. When a client of ours started sending invitations, two of the first five people who wrote back asked the same thing. Is this a paid placement, or is it a pitch? Two out of five isn't noise. People have been burned by podcast invites that turned into an invoice or a sales call with a microphone in the corner. So now every first email says it upfront: no fee, no pitch. Answer the suspicion before they have to ask, and then keep the promise on air.

What's the catch your reader is looking for in your first email?

Two rules I don't bend

The first email carries no links. That means no calendar link, no website, no deck and no "watch our latest episode". Links are how filters decide you're a marketer, and a booking link in a first email is a request for homework from a stranger. You ask if they're up for it. They say yes. Then the link goes out.

The first email carries no pitch either. That covers your product, your round, your results and your offer to help. If you can't resist adding one line about what you do, you're still asking, and the reader feels it before the second sentence.

Plain beats clever

A lot of people spend an hour per prospect making the first line sound like they read every post the person ever wrote. You don't need it. A plain invitation that's relevant to who they are does the work, the way a wedding invitation does. Nobody writes a paragraph about your hobbies on one, and you still say yes because the thing you're invited to is worth going to.

The other mistake is making the invitation read like an audition. A busy, senior person's real fear is sounding dumb on a microphone, and you'll hear it as "am I good enough for this?" So take the risk off their side. Tell them there's a short call first, that they'll get the questions ahead of time, and that they can cut any question they don't like.

The follow-ups

If they don't answer, up to three more short notes go out, still with no links and no pitch. Space them out, a day, then three, then five. Never send a step on the same day as the one before it.

When they say yes

Answer within a couple of business hours. A yes cools faster than you'd think.

Then make the booking easy. One week my AI assistant flagged that 364 people had written back yes to an invitation and only 64 had booked a time. Three hundred people raised their hand and wandered off, because a booking page with a hundred open slots is homework. So we sent two hundred of them one specific time each, something like "I'm free Tuesday at 2:45", with a single use link for that slot. Ten to fifteen booked the same day. Nothing changed except how much work we asked them to do.

Put a few multiple choice questions on the booking form. The best ones are questions the right person is proud to answer, like whether they already have a podcast or are thinking about one. Those answers tell you who you're about to meet before you meet them.

This week

Rewrite your invitation against this chapter. Count every word that's about you, aim for zero, and send it to the first ten names on your list.

Part 02Fifteen, thirty

Chapter 03The first fifteen minutes

Every guest gets a short call before the taping. It runs fifteen minutes and it does three jobs. It takes the nerves out of the show for them, it tells you whether there's a reason to keep talking, and it checks that the taping can physically happen.

That third job sounds small until it saves you. I once booked a pre-interview with a founder and couldn't hear a word he said. The audio scratched and roared, the camera washed him out, and I said hello about nine times. On a live show there's one edit available, and it's delete. So I told him plainly there was no show that day and offered him a slot the following week. The fifteen minutes cost us both a little awkwardness and saved us a broken episode.

They go first

Open with "nice to meet you", one real line of small talk if there's something to say, then name the time and hand them the floor. We've only got fifteen minutes, do you want to go first? Almost everyone takes it, because they came for an interview.

Then your job is to listen and write down their exact words. What are they building right now? What's in the way? Who else is involved when something big gets decided? What's coming in the next ninety days, a launch, a hire or a round? How do customers find them today? You won't ask most of those out loud. A guest preparing for a show tells you most of it unprompted, because it's their story.

When they stop after thirty seconds, ask them to say more. Don't push back on anything and don't try to sound smart. The moment you correct their thesis, they stop telling you what they need and start defending what they said.

Say what you do, early and lightly

For a long time I saved my one line about the business for the last two minutes. It felt polite, and it read like a trap. Now I bring it forward. Somewhere early, in one or two sentences, I say what the company does, and then I go straight back to them. If they lean in, we've got the rest of the call for their needs. If they don't, nobody got ambushed.

Name it once and leave it there. The seed does its work later.

Book the taping on the call

If there's a reason to keep talking, open your calendar while you're both on the line and put the taping in. Don't send "some times" by email afterward. Every day between "sounds great" and a date on the calendar is a day the interest can cool.

Before they go, ask for three small things. A real headshot, so the episode page and the thumbnail show their actual face. The title, which you'll pick together from the prep doc in the next chapter. And whether they'd like to stream the taping live on their own channel too, which most people have never been offered.

When there's nothing there

Some calls are noise. They're still building the product, they raised last month, or they don't need what you sell this year. Close kindly, inside the fifteen minutes, with one of three true exits. It's not a fit right now, here's someone better for you, or let's pick this up in six months. Plenty of those people still make great guests, and the show doesn't care whether they buy.

You'll get faster at telling the difference. On my calls, five minutes in, I usually already know.

You don't have to run it yourself

Once the show is moving, someone on your team can run the pre-interviews and pass you only the guests worth thirty minutes of your time. That's how the hours stay small. Just make sure whoever runs it hands the floor to the guest the same way you would.

This week

Run your next pre-interview with a notepad that has five lines on it: building, in the way, who decides, next ninety days, how customers find them. Fill them from what the guest says, and book the taping before you hang up.

Chapter 04The prep doc

Before the taping, the guest gets a document from you. It's the first thing they'll read that you made, and serious guests use it to decide how careful you'll be with their story. Treat it as a gift you're handing them, because that's how they'll read it.

What's in it

A short welcome and a few lines on how the show works. Twenty minutes live inside a thirty minute slot, the questions are a bank and not a script, they can delete any question they don't like, and if something doesn't land on the day, they say "next" and you move on.

Then a bio of their work, three short paragraphs. Get it right. A guest with thirty years behind him once asked to meet me before he'd agree to come on, and his team's plan was to read the prep doc and check that the bio was accurate. If you get a person's story wrong on paper, you've told them how careful you'll be with it on air.

Then the questions, and then ten title options. That's the whole doc.

The bank

There are 21 questions, in three sections that never change. First comes the road in, how they came to this work. Then the turn, the moment it clicked, the failure or the insight that changed how they see things. Last, what they're building now and where they're taking it.

Put a star on the eight to ten strongest. The starred ones are the spine of a twenty minute show, and the rest are there in case the conversation earns them.

Two questions are the same for every guest. The first one is "What is the listener going to learn by the end of this episode?" It makes the guest name the point of the episode out loud, and it gives a stranger tuning in a reason to stay. The last one is "Who's one person you'd love to hear on this show?" That answer is your next invitation, and it arrives warm, because you can open the email with their name.

Keep each question short enough to read on screen in one breath. We hold ours under 200 characters so they fit on a banner during the stream. Cut the setup clause and keep the question. Put a little humour in three or four of them, aimed at the work and never at the guest.

Nothing personal, ever

No questions about family, childhood, relationships, health or personal money. Two guests asked us for this early on, and it became the rule I'd least like anyone to break. The guest came to talk about their work. If their public footprint is thin, the pre-interview fills the gap, never a question about their private life.

Ask about the story

The questions do a quiet second job, and here it is. Across the 21, you'll learn what's breaking, who decides, what the next ninety days hold and how customers or investors find them today. The craft is to ask about the story, never the transaction.

"How did your first ten customers find you?" tells you how they sell. "Do you do outbound?" is a sales question, and the guest hears it as one. "What did your last round teach you about who to take money from?" tells you where they are with capital. "Are you raising?" is a pitch with a question mark on the end. If a question would sound wrong read aloud on air, rewrite it until it wouldn't.

Ten titles, hook first

Give the guest ten title options and ask them to bold one or suggest something better. I tell every guest the title is sixty to seventy percent of the battle. That's my read after hundreds of episodes, and nobody ran a study on it. A great conversation behind a forgettable title is a conversation almost nobody finds.

Lead every title with the hook, the claim or the number or the line someone will want to argue with. Put the guest's name and company at the end. A stranger doesn't know the company yet, so the hook is what makes them care enough to read the name. And a guest who chose the title shares the episode like it's theirs.

Keep your notes out of it

Your notes on whether they could buy, what to ask in the debrief and what you heard in the pre-interview go somewhere else. The guest reads this document, and some of them forward it to their team. One line about fit in a guest's prep doc undoes everything the invitation promised.

This week

Build one prep doc for your next taping, from the welcome down to the ten titles, and send it the day the taping is booked.

Chapter 05The taping

This is the half hour where the guest gets what you promised them. You're the host, and the host's job is to make the guest sound like the most interesting person in their market. If you do that, everything after the taping gets easier.

How the half hour runs

You book thirty minutes and go live for about twenty. The first five settle everyone in. Check the audio, confirm how they say their name and spell their company, and confirm the title. Then twenty minutes live. The last five come after you end the stream, and they matter more than anything you say on air.

The guest is the hero

Open with the first question from the doc and then follow the arc, the road in, the turn, what they're building now. Your job is to ask and then get out of the way.

Ask for the scene, not the framework. "What's your philosophy on hiring?" gets the answer they've given a hundred times. "Walk me through the week you realized the first sales hire was wrong" gets a story they've never told on camera. The first answer to any question is the rehearsed one. The second follow-up is where the real answer lives.

That means fewer questions. A guest once told me, kindly, after a taping she'd enjoyed, that I'd asked too many questions and gone too shallow. We'd covered about five in twenty minutes and she felt rushed through every one. Her suggestion was to pick three and go deeper. Three or four other guests had said versions of the same thing, so I listened. The stars in the doc are the spine. Use them as permission to skip, not a list to finish.

Keep your scorecard simple. Did I do the research? Am I listening, or am I thinking about my next question while they answer?

Never pitch on air

While the stream is live, you don't pitch. That rules out a soft plug, a mention of your company and a link in the chat. You told them no pitch in the first email. This is where they find out whether you meant it, and everyone watching finds out too.

Bring their audience

Ask before the taping whether they'll share it with their people when it's done. Most say yes, and nobody had ever asked them. If they're streaming it on their own channel, their followers get a notification the moment you go live. We've also tweeted each question live as it was asked, so people could follow the conversation and jump in. By the end of a thirty minute show that pulled in thirty to fifty people, and on longer sessions it got up to two hundred.

End with the next guest

Close with "Who's one person you'd love to hear on this show?" and then where people can find them. Write the name down. That's an invitation you can send tomorrow, and it opens with your guest's name and the words "said you have to come on".

The last five minutes

Once the stream is off, thank them and book the debrief before anyone leaves. Open your calendar, find fifteen minutes later in the week, and put it in while they're still glowing. Good salespeople never leave a call without the next call on the calendar, and this is the easiest one you'll ever book, because you're offering to hand them their episode.

Then add one line: if there's a co-founder or partner who'd weigh in, bring them to the debrief, it saves everyone a second call. The guest invites the partner, not you. A debrief without the person who decides ends in "let me run it by my partner", and you'll need the second call anyway.

This week

Tape one episode with someone you'd love to have as a customer, and don't let them leave the last five minutes without a debrief on the calendar.

Part 03Fifteen, and everything after

Chapter 06The same day

The taping isn't finished when the stream ends. The guest's share is how the episode travels, and the window for it is short. Ship the page and the clips the same day if you can, and the next morning at the latest. By then the energy is still there, and asking for a favour two weeks later is a different conversation.

The episode page

Every guest gets a page on your own domain. It carries the video, the conversation written out, and links to the posts you made about it on LinkedIn, X and YouTube. Send the guest that page, never a raw video link. When they reshare your posts, the engagement stacks up in one place instead of scattering across their version and yours. A year from now, the page is still there when somebody asks a search engine who knows anything about your corner of the market.

Get the names right before it goes live. Automatic captions mangle proper nouns, and a page built from the transcript will happily spell a company wrong on twenty lines. One guest had to write in and ask us to fix his company's name across a whole page. Spell the company the way their own website spells it, and read the page once before anyone else does.

Their real face

Use the headshot you asked for in the pre-interview. We tried AI generated images for a while. On one debrief, an investor who'd just been on the show looked at the image of himself on his page and said two words: uncanny valley. He was waiting on that page so his head of comms could reshare it. Nobody shares a picture of someone who's almost them.

The asset only travels if the guest is proud to post it. A plain photo is fine. A face that's nearly them stops the episode at the door.

Cutting for the scroll

From every guest we cut five short clips. Most clips die in the first second, before the guest finishes their first word, so build each one in three steps. Something in the first second that stops the thumb, a line on screen or a number or a moment that doesn't fit what the eye expected. A headline that ties back to it and gives a reason to keep watching. Then the payoff. Deliver the answer instead of teasing it, because a cliffhanger with no payoff teaches people your clips waste their time.

Fifteen to thirty seconds is a good default. Every clip points somewhere, to the episode page or a booking link. If a clip does well on its own, cut it again with a new hook.

Hand it over

Send the guest a short note the same day with the page, the clips and the posts to reshare. Don't ask them to do anything complicated. One email, everything in it, with one line asking if they'd share it with their people.

Make the share as small as you can. Post from your own accounts first and tag them, so all they have to do is repost. If they have a comms person, offer a line or two they can use as is. Some guests will write their own post anyway, and those tend to travel furthest, because their network hears it in their voice.

The biggest spike we ever had on a show came from a single guest with seventy thousand followers who decided to tweet his own interview. Better thumbnails and titles never touched it. Your audience is small at the start. Theirs might not be.

This week

Ship one episode page with a real photo, the right spelling and the posts linked, plus three clips, and send it to the guest before the end of the next day.

Chapter 07The follow-up and the debrief

Every call gets a follow-up, drafted from your notes, the same day. No exceptions, and that goes double for the calls that felt inconclusive or slightly awkward. A great call writes its own follow-up. The mediocre one is the call people let slide, telling themselves they'll get back to it once things are clearer. Things rarely get clearer on their own. They just get colder.

What the follow-up says

Open with their first name. Then prove you were listening by quoting the most specific thing they said, in their words, not your summary of it. Answer any question they asked, in the order they asked it. Close with one next step.

Keep the email short. If there's depth to share, a plan or a list or the clips, put it on a page and link it. The email exists to get the next conversation, and a four paragraph email reads like a template even when it isn't.

Knowing you'll write this an hour later changes how you take notes during the call. You catch the actual phrase someone used, which is the thing that makes the follow-up land.

The third call

This one runs fifteen minutes, a few days after the taping, and it's the one you booked in the last five minutes of the show. Run it in this order.

Thank them, and hand over the episode, the page and the clips if they don't have them yet. Ask what felt rushed, or what they wanted to say and didn't get to. The polite answer is useless and the specific one is gold, and asking tells them you care how it went for them.

Then ask permission. "Do you mind if I tell you a little about what we do?" Nobody has ever said no to me, because they've just spent half an hour being listened to. Take a minute, not ten. Most of the time, the guest has already told you on air what's broken, so the minute is about them.

Is it cheating?

One founder said it out loud after his own taping. Pitching someone you just interviewed felt like cheating them. I understand the feeling, and it's a good sign, because it means the interview was real.

Follow the thought through, though. If the person you just interviewed has the exact problem you solve, and you know because they told you on camera, staying quiet is the disservice. I don't pitch people who don't need what I do. Out of every thirty or forty guests, about ten have no need at all. They get a thank you and a good episode, and that's the end of it, with no sequence and no awkward check-in.

After the debrief

If there's a live conversation, keep it moving. Send whatever you promised within a few hours of the call. If they go quiet, nudge every three days. Make every nudge carry something, like a clip that did well or an introduction they'd want. Never send "just checking in". After four touches, ask plainly for a decision and accept whatever answer comes back, including not now. The moment they reply, the cadence stops and the conversation takes over.

Some people ripen later. A founder told me how he became a customer of somebody else's service. He went on a podcast and nobody pitched him. Two months later the host came back with an offer that fit what he needed at that moment. Write down what each guest said they were fighting with, so that when you have something that fits, you remember who needed it.

And if someone says no, thank them and never contact them again.

This week

For every call over the next five days, draft the follow-up the same day, with a direct quote and one next step in each. On Friday, count how many went out.

Chapter 08The pipeline

What you build from a show doesn't look like a normal sales funnel, and it shouldn't feel like one to anyone in it. Nobody gets "handled". Every person is in a conversation with you, and the job of the pipeline is to make sure no conversation dies because you forgot about it.

The stages, in plain words

Use the stages a guest moves through. Invited, said yes, booked, pre-interviewed, taped, debriefed, decided. Two more sit beside them. Not now, always with a date attached. And no, which is closed forever and goes on the do-not-contact list the same day.

Next to every name, keep the stage, the date of the last touch and the one thing they said they're fighting with. That third column is what turns a list of names into a list of conversations. When you open the sheet on a Monday, you should be able to look at any row and know what you'd say to that person today, without opening an old email thread.

Anyone sitting in one stage for more than a week needs a look. The most expensive leak is between said yes and booked. Remember the 364 and the 64 from the invitation chapter. The cheapest new conversations you'll ever get are sitting in your inbox with the word yes in them.

Monday morning

Read five numbers against a target before you open your inbox. Sends and new people reached tell you about volume. Positive replies tell you whether the message lands. Bookings and show-ups tell you whether a yes turns into a conversation. Write the target next to each one before you look, so you're reading the gap and not admiring the number.

Add one more, the one I trust most: the share of calls last week that got a follow-up sent within forty eight hours. Sent, not drafted. A draft sitting in your outbox is a promise you haven't kept yet.

Use the same rule for anything new. A new audience gets a first read at day seven and a decision at day fourteen, scale it, fix it or retire it. Without a date, a dead campaign stays alive for months, because killing it feels like admitting something.

What I won't promise you

I won't put a conversion number in this book for you to hit. Your numbers will look like your market, not mine. What I can tell you is what to measure so you find your own. Start with the invitations you sent and the replies they got. Then count how many replies became a booked pre-interview, how many of those guests showed up, how many tapings led to a debrief, and how many debriefs ended in a decision. Track that chain for a month and you'll know where your leak is.

The warmest list you own

Past guests are a list you build without trying. When we wrote to people who'd already been on the show with an update since their episode, 3.78% wrote back, on 450 sends. The same month, cold invitations to strangers got under one percent. The warmer the list, the higher it goes.

This is why the record from chapter one matters. Full names, companies, what they said, what they were fighting with. If every person who's ever talked to you on the record heard from you tomorrow, would it be a warm email or an awkward one?

Inbound arrives late

After enough episodes, people start showing up on their own. By my count, about one in ten of my guests now come in without being invited. They found the show and asked to come on. It's the interest on invitations you sent months ago, and it doesn't show up in the first quarter. Keep sending anyway.

This week

Make a sheet with the five Monday numbers and their targets, the stages above and one column for the date of the last touch. Fill it in on Monday morning before you open your inbox.

Part 04Running it every week

Chapter 09The rhythm

The system only works if it runs every week. The hardest part isn't any single call. It's keeping the heat on long enough for the first month's invitations to turn into the third month's conversations.

The floor

I recommend at least five tapings a week. Call it five hours of your own time, about twenty conversations a month with exactly the people you picked. The pre-interviews happen first and someone on your team can run them, so your hours go to guests who already cleared a bar.

Those five hours aren't extra. They're your sales time. If you're not spending five hours a week in real conversations with buyers, partners or investors, the show isn't the thing taking your time. Something else already is.

What our week looks like

I'll show you our numbers, with the caution that they're ours. In one week we had 145 conversations with people outside the company, and 50 of them were tapings and 31 were pre-interviews. I'm not showing you that because your week should look like it. I'm showing you that we run this on ourselves before we ask anyone else to.

You control the faucet. Calendly lets you open specific days and specific windows. If two afternoons a week is what you want, open two afternoons.

How many invitations make a conversation

Here are our own numbers, pulled from our sending accounts on September 18 for the 31 days before it. We sent 324,880 invitations. 1,505 people wrote back with a real reply, and 884 wrote back interested. The emails that invited people onto a show got replies 0.81% of the time. Emails asking a stranger for something, from the same machine in the same month, got 0.38%.

Now the unflattering half. Even the good number is under one percent. Ninety nine out of a hundred people still ignore us, and the machine still has to get up the next morning and do it again. The invitation roughly doubles the reply rate. It doesn't make a cold list warm.

So don't plan around our rate. Plan around volume you can sustain and measure your own. That's why the Monday sheet exists.

The plumbing

Never send cold from your main address. Use separate domains that forward to you, so a bad week can't cost you the inbox you run your company from. Keep each mailbox to about ten sends a day, and get volume from many mailboxes sending a little. Warm new mailboxes for weeks before they send. If someone runs this for you, those are the questions to ask them.

Don't stop the microwave

The first weeks of any campaign are the warm up. Domains warm, lists get cleaned and the message gets sharper with every reply. A guest who says yes this month shares the episode next month and introduces you to someone the month after that.

A founder we run a show for once wanted to pause in the middle of a campaign that was working. He'd had a bigger idea for a polished in person version and wanted to come back to it in January. I told his team what I'd tell you. Popcorn in a microwave never pops if you stop it every thirty seconds. Keep the online show running, and invite the best guests from it to the premium version. You build the big thing on top of the machine that's already hot.

A week, sketched

If you're starting from nothing, here's a shape that works. Monday morning, the numbers sheet and the replies. Tuesday to Thursday, your calls in the windows you opened, with pre-interviews and tapings next to each other. Same day as each taping, the page and the clips. Friday is for catching up, first any follow-up that slipped, then invitations to the people your guests named.

This week

Block five hours across two days for tapings and open only those windows on your booking page. Then keep them open for the next eight weeks, whatever the first two weeks look like.

Chapter 10What goes wrong

Everything in this chapter has happened to me or to someone running the system with us. None of it is a reason to stop. Each one has a fix, and most of the fixes are boring.

The guest doesn't show

A no-show to a pre-interview gets one short note the same day with one specific new time. If they miss the second one, let it go kindly and leave the door open.

Don't let anyone skip the pre-interview to get to the taping faster. We once missed a guest at the pre-interview twice, and he rebooked straight into the full taping, so the cameras went live with someone I'd never spoken to. I treated the first two minutes as the pre-interview we never had, confirmed what his product was and kept going. It worked out. It almost didn't, and the fix costs fifteen minutes.

The tech fails

If you can't hear them at the pre-interview, there's no taping that day. Say it plainly and offer a new slot. Pretending it's fine costs them far more than the awkwardness does.

Send one join link per meeting, too. Two links in one invite and the guest has to guess which room is real.

The guest isn't a fit

You'll learn in the pre-interview that some people will never buy. Give them the episode anyway if they'll make a good guest, and one of the three honest exits from the pre-interview chapter if they won't. Don't pitch someone who doesn't have the need. It's a waste of their time and it teaches you nothing.

You pitched too early

The usual places are the first email, the opening of the pre-interview and the middle of the taping. The fix is the order. Invite, listen, book the next call, ask permission, then say what you do in a minute. If you nail the words in the wrong order, you'll lose. If you get the words a little wrong but keep the order, you'll still be fine.

The opposite mistake is just as common. Saving the one line about your business for the very end of a call, so it lands as a gotcha. Name it early and lightly, then get back to them.

You went quiet after the taping

This is the most expensive mistake in the book, and the easiest to fix. The episode went well and the guest was glowing. Then nothing happened for two weeks, because nobody booked the debrief on the call and the follow-up never left your drafts. Book the debrief in the last five minutes. Write the follow-up the same day. Check the forty eight hour number every Monday.

They think it's a pitch

Expect "is this paid?" and "is this a sales call?" Answer it in the first email with no fee, no pitch. Then keep the promise on air. By the debrief you've kept one promise, which is rarer in anyone's inbox than it should be.

They say they're not interesting

Senior people will tell you they don't have much to say, or ask whether they're good enough for your show. Don't argue. Send them three or four specific questions about something only they would know, and remind them they can cut any of them. Most people who say they're not interesting just haven't been asked a good question in years.

You feel like an imposter

A few weeks in, the calendar fills up and a voice says you're not a podcaster, so who are you to interview these people? Nobody needs that title. What matters is being curious and prepared. Guests will forgive a clumsy question. They won't forgive a host who clearly didn't read about them.

Someone says no

Thank them, add them to the do-not-contact list that day, and never write to them again, from any address, about any show. A person who has said no and hears from you again doesn't remember the show. They remember that you didn't listen. That's why the list is permanent.

You want to stop

Some week, it'll feel slow, or a bigger idea will show up and the current version will look small. Look at the Monday sheet before you decide. Most of what this system produces arrives later than the work that caused it.

The last thing to do this week

Pick the one failure in this chapter you're most likely to hit and write its fix on the same page as your Monday numbers. Then go invite someone. Whose story in your market has nobody asked to hear yet?