From a LinkedIn profile to a show shortlist

The box on our homepage takes a LinkedIn profile URL. A website works too, and it is the better input when the guest is a business rather than a person. Here is what runs after you press Start.

First the agent reads the profile. It pulls out who the person is, what they have done, and the handful of things they can talk about without preparing for a week. A profile is usually the better source for that than a company site, because a profile is where someone describes themselves and a site describes a product.

Then it writes show clusters. A cluster is a topic angle with a label, one to three podcast categories, a few keywords, a rationale and a pitch angle. Up to five per run. They are what connects "this person is a supply chain consultant" to "these are the shows that book supply chain guests".

Each cluster becomes a query against our podcast database, which holds 3.4 million shows. We match on categories and keywords, then drop the shows that stopped publishing and the ones with no real back catalogue. Every row carries a contact address, so a match is a show we can actually pitch.

Audience size comes back as a tier rather than a number. The tiers are estimates we derive ourselves. We do not have measured download counts, so we do not show them.

After the shows come the people. The agent surfaces the host, booker or producer behind each show, then writes three sample pitches so you can read what would go out before anything does.

All of that is free. The charge is $0.10 when a pitch is actually sent, and a new account starts with $10 in credits. See the pricing page for the rest.

The step that surprised us while building this was the cluster step. Early runs went straight from the profile to a keyword search, and the show lists came back wide and useless. Making the agent commit to an explicit cluster first, with a written rationale and a pitch angle, cut the lists down and made them defensible. It also gave us something to hand you: the clusters become your campaigns, and you can edit them before anything sends.